Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

UNIVERSITY ACCELERATORS

The constraints and resources of a university are unique and can play a powerful role in the startup community, which we will discuss in more depth in the next chapter. For now, let’s explore how an accelerator could work in a university environment by taking a look at the program being created at MIT by Bill Aulet, the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

For students interested in entrepreneurship, MIT functions as a ramp where students can build their entrepreneurial knowledge and skills so they reach escape velocity upon graduation. This approach ramp works well for many students, but some high-level students found it lacking, and eventually dropped out of MIT or openly considered dropping out to start a company instead of finish their college education. They pointed to Ellison, Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg. They heard the calls from Peter Thiel to drop out of college (http://startuprev.com/o2). They were fascinated with TechStars, Y Combinator, and similar programs.

As we tell entrepreneurs, when there is a crisis, there is great opportunity for innovation. So at MIT we took some of our own medicine and explored what we could do to meet this challenge of making the academic environment more conducive to successful entrepreneurial development.

We looked at Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington. We discussed the issue with students and saw their high level of interest ...