Academia aiding entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship. It's a word as heavy with potential responsibility and rewards as it is difficult to spell.

But Utah's colleges and universities, like their brethren worldwide, have been doing more in recent years to help the aspiring entrepreneur. While remaining committed to educating business students who want to leap into Corporate America's arms right out of school, the institutions are doing more to help would-be start-up makers start up.

Whether it's full degree programs, a smattering of specialized courses, sprinkling entrepreneur elements into "regular" business courses, business plan writing competitions, dabbling in venture funds or talks with self-made business leaders in the community, they have spent the past few years offering more tools to help students build careers as entrepreneurs.

"This is going on not only nationwide, but it's an international kind of phenomenon," said Gaylen Chandler, head of the department of management and human resources at Utah State University. "There is simply a lot more entrepreneur instruction going on now than there used to be."

Different approaches

The approaches are varied. The University of Utah, for one, offers a full entrepreneur degree program, having started an entrepreneurship program about five years ago.

"Most major educational institutions for a long time were there basically to teach theory and teach concepts and prep you to go into the corporate environment and have some basic tools and learn how to fit into the corporate world," said Leonard Black, director of the Utah Entrepreneur Center at the U.

"When you're an entrepreneur, you need to have working knowledge of a whole broad spectrum of accounting, finance, marketing, sales, management — you need all of it. You don't need so much theory of it. You need to have what I call workable skills."

Those include knowing the right places to find the right information to validate business ideas as true opportunities in the marketplace, writing a business plan, finding start-up money and continuing through an exit strategy, he said. "And that mentality is left out of basic education, in my opinion," he said.

"The whole concept behind that is not that you necessarily start a business, but I teach about the concept of accumulation of wealth. You promote the concept that what your young people need to do is start a business, get it up and running, make it successful, then step away from that and do it again so that they continue to really build the economy. It's an interesting concept to sell."