Can higher education produce better/faster startups?
Given where I work it I do spend a lot of time thinking about how I can do more to help build a culture at the University of Waterloo where trying your hand at a startup is easier, has a higher likelihood of success, and it won’t cost you your education. There are a lot of things the University does to make that goal harder to achieve:
- We have a strong co-operative education system that trains students to strive for a good job in a larger company
- With co-op you have to sort out your next term 3 months ahead of time in the midst of exams, assignments, etc.
- Engineering is very inflexible with programming, you want to take an extra term and work on a startup? You can’t, you take a year off and fall off track with your friends.
These are a few big things that make it hard for entrepreneurs also make it great for the most number of students. U of Waterloo has a lot of other things to make things easier for entrepreneurs (ecoop, Impact, etc) as well with VeloCity being the latest and (in my opinion) greatest idea to build a culture that can offer many things but most importantly support for students from their peers. I think it important that higher education does everything it can to foster entrepreneurship with students just as it does later in an academic career for faculty, why? Some interesting posts came to my twitter stream this week:
Every time an engineer joins Google, a startup dies
Students want the job, the money, the partner, and the security now. I have experienced it as a student and have those conversations with students now. This quote comes from a US perspective but if this is a true statement of the US it is likely very true in Canada as well:
“As much as we like to think of our culture as being entrepreneurial, the reality is 99% of our top talent doesn’t seriously contemplate starting companies. Colleges crank out tons of extremely smart and well-educated kids every year. The vast majority go into “administrative” careers that don’t really produce anything – law, banking and consulting. Most of the rest join big companies.” – Chris Dixon
More needs to be done to support undergrad and graduate students. The problem is that it may compete or complicate the support that already exists for the Profs that grind the undergrads and grads. I think we need to find a way to make supporting undergrads a win win for the phds.
For jobs, look to university spin-offs
So does the traditional support of commercializing research work? According to an article in CNN this week it does:
“Here’s where higher education already has made a real difference. University-launched startups are particularly good powerhouses for value creation; Brent Goldfarb and Magnus Henreksen found in 2003 that at least 8 percent of university spin-offs in the United States become public companies, more than 100 times the average of new companies.” – from CNN
Again this is the US but I would bet a similar ratio exists or could exist in Canada. If you could get a similar ratio from companies started by students with the skills that aren’t research focused? Maybe not public companies but profitable employers that train the future CEOs of public companies.
Accelerating the process of innovation. Changing the future of learning: Startl
Is innovation required outside of the walls of academia because there is a better way?
“Accelerator is a three month residency and immersion into design methods and business practices for early stage learning enterprises.” – Startl
As best I can tell that isn’t happening in an higher education environment. Why not? I am part of something similar here with our Bootcamp program where we are trying out mixing higher education experience with the local early stage entrepreneurs. So far I think VeloCity has seen a little success with at least three companies at a stage where they are launching products and hiring co-op students working out of offices in Waterloo and Toronto. With two of them they have faced the strain of balancing their academic carrier with their startup. Until we can alleviate that strain in some way I don’t think VeloCity will be a great success. One thing that is happening is that we are learning and adapting quickly…
I am not sure I support the idea that Y Combinator (and programs like it) is the new Graduate School. In order to train entrepreneurs you need successful entrepreneurs to train them but the million dollar question in my mind: are academic institutions capable of allowing non-academics to play a role? I think they are. The important bit is that Higher Education offers some credibility to the lessons learned that is transferable outside a particular sphere of influence. I think that is important for the student.
Building a bridge
I am optimistic that we can build a model here at U of Waterloo that could be duplicated in other schools. I believe that higher education must do more to foster entrepreneurs as well as focus on the normal process of fostering academic growth and development. That bridge between academic study and real experience is something Waterloo built a long time ago with Co-op, the difference is with entrepreneurship is that your work experience is a lot more self directed and requires more flexibility.