Forbes Looks at Dorm Room Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship Programs

Found an interesting article on student entrepreneurs when researching Under Armour founder Kevin Plank. This article, by Archana Rajan, highlights some of the actions that various colleges and universities (including the Smith School at the University of Maryland — where Plank studied) are doing to support and encourage student entrepreneurs.

While profiling Maryland Grad and CrookedMonkey T-Shirts founder Micha Weinblatt, Rajan writes,

Now 26 years old, Weinblatt owns a business that has booked more than $700,000 in sales during 2009. And he couldn’t have done it without the help he got from the University’s of Maryland’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship–a business boot camp that helps students create, launch and grow their own companies.

College Hunks Hauling Junk is featured in the In Pictures: Dorm Room Entrepreneurs feature at Forbes.com

“The Dingman Center has been a tremendous source of advice for me, especially since I didn’t go to the business school,” says Weinblatt. Advice provided by the center taught him essential business skills, like how to forecast and monitor sales. It introduced him to a network of like-minded student entrepreneurs he could rely on for support and as a sounding board for new ideas. And it provided access to a network of successful entrepreneurs outside the school.

Weinblatt then describes his various interactions with Kevin Plank. From Rajan:

“During one of their meetings, Plank told him to concentrate on what the company does best; as a result, CrookedMonkey focused on its strength in the wholesale business, as opposed to selling directly to consumers over the Internet. Weinblatt says the advice helped the company succeed despite a recession.

Its great to hear that Dingman and Plank are available to students from across the campus and not just the business school. This is a sign of an open, diverse entrepreneurial eco-system on campus.

There are compelling statistics surrounding the growth of entrepreneurship centers and classes and many insights into the low-risk nature of founding a firm while on campus.

Other schools and programs mentioned include MIT, University of California Berkely, University of Pennsylvania, and Northeastern University.

There is pictorial with the article titled In Pictures: Dorm Room Entrepreneurs

Dorm Room Entrepreneurs – Forbes.com.

Obama Hosts Entrepreneurship Summit on Development in the Muslim World

President Obama is hosting a two day Presidential Summit with more than 250 business and social leaders from 50 countries, most with large or majority Muslim populations.

The summit is the follow up to Obama’s Cairo speech last summer and looks to use entrepreneurship, and social entrepreneurship, as major tools in increasing development throughout the Muslim world.

Many in the article claim that this is a nice thought, but that other issues – Iran nuclear policy, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel – matter far more.

From the piece;

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke opened the gathering by challenging the entrepreneurs to take “the tremendous success that all of you have had individually and expand it throughout the Islamic world.”

“There are over a billion people living in Muslim-majority countries today, and they represent a vast reserve of underutilized potential in the global economy, both in terms of their demands for goods and services as well as their ability to create technological and social innovations that will drive economic growth and social development,” Locke said.

Here is the official summit page and here is the official White House Press Briefing. BTW, it appears you can stream it live as well.

Obama Hosts Global Summit on Entrepreneurship – FoxSmallBusinessCenter.com.

The Global Entrepreneurship Index

Many things are interesting, but one of the most interesting is how people use creativity to become more innovative. I call this entrepreneurship. People in all countries are creative and want to make a better life for themselves and their families. How well are they doing?

Over the past few years, my colleagues at the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor have developed a way to measure this activity, and to suggest ways in which countries can improve on their performance. The Global Entrepreneurship Index is a tool that allows countries to understand how your country is doing on a wide range of indicators. You can download a copy for free. While lots of indexes exist, for almost everything, they very seldom allow you to actually see how to improve your current position.

Awhile back at a conference in Istanbul I presented the index to an audience and suggested how the world would be able to improve its well-being by following along. The results were interesting and I will present a step-by-step report on the index, how it works, how it can be improved, and how it can improve lives.

I have been involved with GEM for almost a decade and have helped move this organization toward its present global position. I hope that this new index will propel it to a new level.

Cool Video on Educating Entrepreneurs with Mark Ecko and Others

Really good video where entrepreneurs discuss how we can develop the next generation of entrepreneurs. Really nice to hear the thoughts of Leonard Brody, Mark Ecko, Don Moody, and John Petry– each succesful in the new venture space and each has been active in education reform in the U.S. (click image to view the panel discussion)

The panel is moderated by Ira Sokowitz and was part of last year’s Global  Entrepreneurship Week. All were great and I especially liked Ecko’s discussion of finding and creating a narrative. In our class, New Venture Creation, we often discuss the the need for entrepreneurs, in writing a plan and pitching, to present/paint a picture of the future and engage the audience while doing it.