Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

CHALLENGES TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROGRAMS AT UNIVERSITIES

Although there are many interesting things going on at CU Boulder around entrepreneurship, there are some challenges that generalize to any university environment. Brad Bernthal describes three key challenges: (1) entrepreneurial engagement is not rewarded within the faculty incentive structure, (2) lack of resources for entrepreneurial programs, and (3) cross-campus collaboration is not in the DNA of a university. Bernthal provides solutions to each of them in the following section:

In startup conversations there is powerful rhetorical appeal to make the local research university the next—and you can fill in the blank here—MIT, Stanford, or similar research institution closely tied to a thriving startup community. What this actually means is seldom well defined and often frustrating to anyone trying to accomplish the goal of integrating entrepreneurship more deeply into the university.

The blueprint for a leading entrepreneurial research university is to be three things: (1) a community catalyst: a nerve center where the startup community convenes and information spillovers occur; (2) a magnet, teacher, and pipeline for the next generation of entrepreneurial talent into the region; and (3) a source of insight, ranging from innovative ideas that can be commercialized, to broad and fundamental understandings about what makes startups as well as startup communities work.

Formidable barriers in academia, however, present ...