Ashoka Chooses GMU as ChangeMaker Campus

The Ashoka Foundation has chosen George Mason University and 3 other schools for their Changemaker Campus program.

This pilot program’s goal is to bring social entrepreneurship to the students, faculty, and administrators on the participating campuses. Read about the Change Maker Campus initiative here. From Ashoka’s website,

Over the course of the next year, we aim to bring students and faculty together with practitioners, thought leaders, and philanthropists to create new and effective partnerships for sustainable social change.

We’ll carefully monitor and evaluate what happens along the way, identifying the precise outcomes and impact of the program and the innovative teaching and partnerships it spurs. Apart from the impact at each partner university, the program is thus meant to capture the how-to strategies and best practices for effecting deep, lasting, and campus-wide social change.

There will be two meetings this week for GMU students, faculty, and staff to check out.

 

Student Run Venture Funds

Business plan competitions have long been a must ‘participate’ activity for students wanting to launch their own ventures. But another group of students, those wanting to be venture capitalists, often enter competitions in order to learn about bplans, financial projections, and also to network with venture capitalists and other financiers/professional service providers that judge, sponsor, and attend competitions.

Another tool that schools are using in order to teach and support entrepreneurship are student run venture funds. Though less well known than competitions and obviously harder to offer (due to capital needs) they are interesting to look at as learning tools and also in order to see if these student VCs can perform better than the pros.

WSJ writer Christopher Zinsli offers a piece on some student run funds and the students who manage them.

A handful of business schools are experimenting with giving students free rein over how to invest millions of dollars. These programs function much like real-world venture firms, but they face unique obstacles and remain unproven ventures.

Student venture capitalists do nearly everything their professional counterparts do — sourcing and selecting deals, negotiating terms, counseling portfolio companies — with minimal interference from college administrators and advisers. Investment decisions, researched and recommended by committees of students based on their areas of study, are voted on by the full groups, which can consist of up to 30 students.

The article mentions funds at U of Michigan (Wolverine Venture Fund) , Cornell (Big Red Ventures), and Penn State U (Garber Venture Capital Fund).

 

Are prostitutes entrepreneurs?

I have been interested for a long time in prostitution and its social and economic roles. It’s a subject with  great relevance across countries – to the tax base, safety of women, empowerment or disempowerment, ethics and culture, religion and morality, etc.

Moral discussion aside, workers (male and female) in the sex industry provide a service for which there is demand. Prostitution would not occur if there were no customers. If one includes self-employment within “entrepreneurship”, which some do, then this is an interesting and understudied area of research.

My personal interest in prostitution is how it relates to the longterm welfare and employment choices of women, and how policy can be designed against trafficking , sexual slavery and child prostitution. Reality (and history!) indicate that prostitution is not going to stop and it may be time to think about things like safety and disease control.

I’ll blog more on this later, and on some new research on prostitution. A great start is a paper by Steve Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh on street-level prostitution in Chicago (see here). Two important findings: (1) “Condoms are used only one-fourth of the time and the price premium for unprotected sex is small”; and (2) “A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police office than to get officially arrested by one”.

Additionally, there are some interesting organizational and management elements to prostitution as well, like the relationship between pimps and prostitutes.

In the meantime, check out (here) what the State Tax Authority APEH has done in Hungary, where entrepreneur permits can be issued to commerical sex workers, in order to attract the more than 20,000 people and equivalent of 717.13 million Euro lost in the underground sex industry. Talk about a tax base!

 

Campus Diversity: Theory v Reality

One of the reasons that we are investigating the campus as an entrepreneurial environment is that in its most ideal form there is huge diversity on campus (i.e., age, race, field of study, nationality, political viewpoints, personal preferences, socio-economic background, etc). This diversity is believed to bring many advantages.

The social and economic benefits of diversity are discussed at length in Richard Florida’s writings and others – I am partial to Jane Jacobs’ ideas in The Economy of Cities.

WSJ writer Hannah Karp’s story, From Bloomingdales to Bloomington, tells of a new diversity at Indiana University’s main Bloomington campus where a large influx of students from the Northeast is changing life on campus. From the story:

In Indiana University’s Assembly Hall last Friday, a remarkably large chorus hailing from private high schools in the Northeast was singing the school’s ode to the “Cream and Crimson” in a pronounced New York accent.

It’s a striking byproduct of one of the most competitive college admissions sessions ever — an influx of East Coast prep-school students in Indiana. Indiana University welcomed about 260 students from the greater New York City area to the limestone lecture halls on its lush, leafy campus last week, up 12.5% from last year. Another 175 came from New Jersey, up 25% from 2007, and 50 hail from Connecticut. While the numbers of students matriculating from in-state and other parts of the country are steadily increasing as well — the school had some 500 more students accept admission offers than it had planned for — the last three years have been marked by unprecedented growth from the Northeast.

The droves of East Coast students descending on Bloomington are ruffling some feathers among the 61% of students who call Indiana home.

Upperclassmen say the tension begins to build from day one of freshman year, as most East Coasters request to live in the same cluster of dorms and send in housing deposits to guarantee their spots long before committing to the school. Jess Berne, a freshman from New York’s suburban Westchester County who had also applied to Penn State and the University of Wisconsin, sent in her housing deposit to Indiana as soon as she was admitted in October, at the school’s recommendation, eight months before she decided to actually enroll. She also requested to room with a fellow New Yorker, Becky Davies, whom she met on Facebook.

The story is interesting/funny (a father of a NY student thinks something is not quite right in Bloomington because people are so friendly) and anecdotal, but leads one to wonder whether diversity works ‘positively’ with open, accepting minds leading the way new understanding and ideas? Or does diversity work because of ‘friction’ and new outputs that are the result of worlds colliding?

 

Johan Eklund, Ph.D.

My dear friend and coauthor Johan Eklund defended his PhD in Economics this week at Jönköping International Business School. His research interests are primarily within financial economics and law and economics. His thesis is titled “Corporate Governance, Private Property and Investment”, and focuses on the relationships between corporate governance structures, institutions and structural change, and investment patterns and climate. He is doing some interesting work on ownership structure and control mechanisms like dual-class shares.

Johan has joined the Ratio Institute as a researcher (see announcement here).

Congratulations on your defense, Dr. Eklund!

 

Academy of Management

I recently attended the AoM Conference in Anaheim (August 8-13). There are always many interesting sessions and papers – some things are fascinating because of their potential or actual contribution to what we already know, while others are fascinating because they are unique, subtle or simply a bit wacky.

In any case, I was completely blown away by the interest in neuroeconomics and entrepreneurship. This area of research may give researchers the ability to look into the mind of the entrepreneur. It is transdisciplinary (part of Zoltan Acs’ Creative Class Experience, see here) and can be used to study behavior and decision-making across multiple levels.

Angela Stanton, Mellani Day, Norris Krueger, Isabell Welpe, Zoltan Acs, David Audretsch and myself participated in several sessions on the subject. My favorite was an interactive session with about 30 attendees. Everybody was split into groups to identify promising areas for neuroscience research in their own specializations or fields. A lively discussion followed about research trajectories, ethics and control of human behavior and emotions, and even specific research questions. I think everybody was thrilled with the outcome of this session.

 

StoreAdore.com — Harvard Business School

Found out about this company on the Style page of the WSJ. Storeadore.com is a website that will help people find great shopping when they are visiting other cities. According to the Ins and Outs column by Jennifer Sarnow and Ray Smith,

The site, launched earlier this year by avid shoppers Meredith Barnett and Cristina Miller, who roomed together at Harvard Business School, profiles boutiques in New York City, the Hamptons, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., as well as online stores. San Francisco will be added in August and Miami, Dallas, Houston and Atlanta in the fall.

Here is their website and here is a little bit about them. (Who is your roomate? Lab partner? Neighbor?)

 

Is Campus Entrepreneurship the New Frontier?

Earlier this year, Zoltan and I were discussing a possible paper for me to write as part of a ‘directed reading.’ Over time Zoltan recommended that I look into Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Turner argues it is the frontier experience, rather than European influence, that led to the development of America’s unique political, social and economic systems.

I am in the midst of finishing the draft of a paper in which I use Turner’s frontier attributes/frameworks to analyze the university/college campus environment from an entrepreneurial perspective. Found the money quote below while reading through the 1921 book edition of his thesis.

The pioneer was taught in the school of experience that the crops of one area would not do for a new frontier; that the scythe of the clearing must be replaced by the reaper of the prairies. He was forced to make old tools serve new uses; to shape former habits, institutions and ideas to changed conditions; and to find new means when the old proved inapplicable. He was building a new society as well as breaking new soil; he had the ideal of nonconformity and of change. He rebelled against the conventional.

Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the ideal of personal development, free from social and governmental constraint.

More to come on this subject as I flesh out the paper over the next week or so.