Before we can build a great entrepreneurial program, we need to clearly state the definition we want to use for our program. A recent report of a provost commission focused on the University of Michigan’s definition of Entrepreneurship I’d like to address this. Key parts of this post come from the report which is posted here.

There are lots of definitions of entrepreneurship out there – some make sense, and some do not – and very few are actually useful in academia. A good definition for entrepreneurship helps students, professors and administrators to rally around key values and it helps everybody understand why some activities are prioritized and others are not. It further helps traditional academic disciplines how to link into entrepreneurship and innovation education. That is particularly important at the University of Michigan. With its nearly 100 top-ten programs, U-M provides an almost unmatched richness of breadth of entrepreneurial talent and opportunities. But that richness can only be materialized if these units actually collaborate towards a common goal.

The basic challenge academic units have been struggling with is the tension between an overly narrow and an overly board definition of entrepreneurship. On one hand, entrepreneurship could be defined as “starting and growing companies.” That may be a crisp definition but it runs afoul of both employers of our students and also of large parts of the on-campus community. Recruiters of existing companies like Google, SpaceX, IBM, and also of more traditional companies like GM and GE, tell us about the importance of entrepreneurial talent in their ranks. Here is what we hear: “We need to find a way to constantly reinvent ourselves”; “We need employees that can talk to the CEO”; “We need employees who question the status quo”; “We will only survive if we innovate!” Thus, it would be doing our students a dis-service if we only focused on the startup process. Our faculty across the university see entrepreneurship and think new ideas and innovation as the most important characteristic of entrepreneurship, the ability to generate social value and make the world a better place, an action-based implementation. Yes, business creation is part of that, but that’s not where it stops.

The other extreme of entrepreneurial definition is to equate entrepreneurship to “creative problem solving.” That, of course, includes all the broadening aspects of the definition by employers and by the on-campus community, but it misses the point. Fundamentally, a broad definition like this basically leads to a relabeling of already performed tasks and teaching, without adding much value at all. Is everything innovative we teach in entrepreneurship, most engineering classes may be classified as entrepreneurship, because they are about solving problems and new technological solutions? Thus, the definition has to be broader than “starting a business,” but narrower than “creative problem solving.”

Therefore we believe, U-M, entrepreneurship should have three defining characteristics and one measure of true success:

1)      Serve a relatively large external constituency

Entrepreneurship is primarily about an external community, not about an individual. It’s about service and it’s about service at scale. An entrepreneurial venture is not just about you and your four house-mates, or you and your sorority – it has to be large enough so the target audience is not under your control – a truly external.

2)      Propose a product or service, broadly defined, that the external constituency would appreciate, based on an in-depth understanding of the culture, values and needs of the constituency.

Here is the truly personal aspect of entrepreneurship. It’s the coupling of something new that is generated within a person or a small team that is focused towards the outside per 1. These creative and innovative ideas are informed by knowledge of the outside. In the CFE, we focus on these two parts using a process called customer development, a term coined by our friend Steve Blank.

3)      Include the design and implementation of the product or service, recognizing all of the physical, economic, and social constraints that would impede adoption, or at minimum a plan for doing so that has resolved all questions of feasibility and cost.

We are strong believers that entrepreneurship is action based. We learn about entrepreneurship through implementation of a plan and by continually including feedback from the target audience that is to be served. In the CFE, we most often use a process called the Business Model Canvas, an active way to search for a business model that connects our creative idea (defined under 2) with the target audience (defined under 1), while taking into account all constraints from financial, legal, societal and other constraints.

The forth part of entrepreneurship is the kicker and perhaps the hardest to learn – you get to choose your target audience, you get to choose your key innovative idea to implement and even how you want to go about this – but, you do not get to choose whether you are successful!

4)      Be evaluated by the external constituency itself, not just the team or other inside parties (e.g. an instructor).

For entrepreneurship to deserve that title there has to be external validation. It’s not primarily measuring inputs and actions of the entrepreneurs – it measures reactions and impacts of the entrepreneurial venture. Entrepreneurial ventures are outward facing, and serve others. Note that in a business context serving others can generate personal profits, but that is not a necessary condition for our definition.

There are a number of key ingredients to entrepreneurial education. They spread over many different units, demonstrating that entrepreneurship by our definition is a perfect fit for our excellence over breadth here at U-M. Among others, entrepreneurial education should include:

• The ability to develop an in-depth “anthropological” understanding of a population of people.
• The ability to identify significant problems to be solved in that population.
• The ability to generate creative alternative concepts, based on technology or otherwise, for solving the problem and to methodically evaluate and choose the alternatives with the best balance of feasibility and value.
• The ability to scale a solution to serve a big community, often requiring new technologies, new implementations and new partners.
• The ability to conduct market or audience research.
• Project management, the ability to plan and manage the implementation of the chosen alternative effectively, across its physical, social, and economic dimensions.
• Understanding of the language of business and also some legal constraints.
• The interpersonal and leadership skills required for team problem solving and implementation.
• The self-presentation skills that allow for successful representation to the wider world.
• An understanding of the importance – and mechanisms – for an evaluation of the solution by the population at which it is aimed.

According to this definition, entrepreneurial projects can be a new tech startup, obviously. But, it can also be a social venture, as described here, or an artistic project. In other words, entrepreneurial projects are the very projects we at U-M are most proud of: big projects that make the world a better place!

Can you imagine how big and impactful U-M entrepreneurship can become once we all have this common vocabulary across all disciplines, and we deploy the excellence of many academic departments and talented professors to teach towards these objectives and enabling entrepreneurial projects we know of and many none of us have even dreamt about!

Increasingly, our educational system has to grapple with the fact that our young talent has to enter into a global economy that is highly competitive and changing on a time-scale that it short compared to the career duration of any one individual. People with an entrepreneurial mindset and skillset are going to do better in this environment of change than the ones who see their job as merely funding when you do “enough.” We are still inventing the educational system that provides such entrepreneurial know-how while continuing to provide the timeless value of a basic education and deep knowledge in a chosen field.

The Center for Entrepreneurship and its partners are spending a lot of time thinking about the curriculum and experiences our students at the University of Michigan should be exposed to in order to provide the value our students need during their careers. We think there are critical elements like “customer development”- anthropology of an audience an entrepreneurial project is targeted towards; there is innovation and creativity to come up with new ideas and solutions; and then we teach business basics, technology-specific and legal knowledge that we want each entrepreneur to know as they implement these new ideas so they can truly scale. We also think that the entrepreneurial toolbox should be accompanied with a mindset that realizes success is not the absence of failure, and that new solutions do not come from doing the same thing all over again.

As we develop these new toolsets, we worry about how we bring the right students to campus that can really benefit from the richness of what we offer here. For example, a student with a 4.0 GPA during her entire high school years obviously has not failed at anything, at least not noticeably. The moment she steps into our entrepreneurship class, we now have to encourage her that making mistakes is not a bad thing – it is actually encouraged! And in doing so, we are opposing a key selection criterion every school is proud about.

That became obvious to me recently during a meeting with some of the university’s top donors, many whom are successful entrepreneurs. One of the donors asked a really serious question: “If the University of Michigan wants to be entrepreneurial, do we have to change the mix of our students?” With a twinkle in his eyes, he looked around and said: “Look at us, boys!” All of the entrepreneurs started laughing out loud and they agreed: “None of us would make it in today.”  And that worries me.

Some of the entrepreneurs in the room struggled because their parents were poor; some of them played around with ideas and companies and sometimes forgot to go to class. But all of them suggested that the entrepreneurs – in the long run are not students with a 4.0 GPA who never made mistakes and always do exactly what professors tell them to do!

There are therefore a number of challenges campuses like the University of Michigan have to address for us to become the “innovation accelerator” we seek to be. Here are three things I am thinking about right now:

1)      Many studies prove that diversity in an ecosystem adds to its creative potential. Even though some recent coverage to this topic may be a little bit simplistic, it goes to a topic I have become increasingly worried about. I do not bump into U-M students often enough who seek to become the first college graduates in their families – a kind of kid like me. Entrepreneurial skills and mindset are particularly useful for talented individuals who come out of poverty and distress, because they allow building a new world. Yet, many of them are not finding their way into U-M anymore. We need to seriously address that in our admission procedures. In my estimation, failure to address this problem is not an option for campuses that want to excel!

2)      “We are all rich kids, and that worries us,” the leadership of an entrepreneurial student organization told me recently. I thought that was a very astute observation and I loved them for their courage to say out loud what bothers them. So many co-curricular programs at top universities today are benefiting an even smaller fraction of students, and possibly an even less diverse group than our student body overall. Students without many financial means are less likely to work on a company and instead flip burgers or paint houses – the very way I used to make money back when I was a student. We need to find ways to eliminate hurdles for students who seek to engage in enriching educational programs. We know these hurdles are in play – what does it take to buy our students out of such constrained situations?

3)      The final challenge to growing entrepreneurship on campus relates to the time near graduation and the time immediately afterwards. So often, the decision about the first job is dominated by one issue and one issue alone: how do I get out of the student debt? Starting a company with educational debt is like competing in a triathlon with baggage and clothes. Try swimming 200 yards with your jeans and a sweater and you know what I am talking about, or try running only four miles with a small rucksack – I have done both. You cannot believe how tough it is. We need to find a Y Combinator like funding vehicle that gives our most promising students a way to get started. Upstart.com provided the solution for Val Gui, perhaps we need to work even closer with UM grad and Upstart founder Dave Girouard, and perhaps we need to build out more such solutions. But, perhaps we can find solutions that leave entrepreneurial students without debt upon graduation – just like many of our athletes. We can do it with one set of slightly unusual student – why not with the other?

I am a strong believer in the fact that we will become a better and a more entrepreneurial and a more impactful campus if we address these three challenges. I am interested in your opinions about

I gave this talk as part of a EiE teacher’s program for elementary school teachers focused on incorporating engineering concepts and practices early into the classroom.

I am excited to welcome you to the University of Michigan. We are excited to have you here because we are acutely aware of the fact that we and universities like us rely on what you and your colleagues give and expose your students to many years before they step into our classrooms. I talk to a lot of very successful scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs and I am convinced that the seeds of knowledge and experience that turn into actions are planted in elementary and middle school.

The flames you ignite in elementary school turn into impactful fires of creativity and innovation, of teaching and learning. There is nothing more powerful than a young mind asking for answers and in fact finding a way to collaborate and solve problems.

I am therefore a huge proponent of bringing engineering and science to the classroom early on. We need engineers and we are going to need more in the future. In a talk at U-M, Alan Mulally CEO of Ford and formerly from Boeing said: I think that engineering is going to be the most significant contributor to system solutions – one of the biggest things we are all concerned about worldwide!

The children in your classroom may be the innovators that create completely autonomous cars, untap new energy sources and solve resource challenges of an increasingly populated earth. Their work may empower large numbers of people to come out of poverty and desperation and build new and better lives for their children. Engineering is turning science into action. It’s a tremendously empowering discipline in many ways, and is full of optimism and action: let’s not just examine and figure out what’s wrong – let’s go fix it!  It’s extremely powerful and a science and engineering interest sets up careers with tremendous opportunity!

I believe that this introduction starts early. It starts with playing, building, trying and learning. Perhaps it’s a Lego project, or an iPhone game built with new software.  But, what we are excited about is when that site, that software starts becoming useful and starts addressing needs. Now that’s the realm of engineers, especially University of Michigan engineers. The kind of skillset it takes to make a difference by bringing three things together: 1) creativity – cool ideas based on knowledge of what’s wrong or what’s possible; 2) a toolset – here is the math and science we learn in school, but it’s also the ability to work in teams and do things, such as programming or soldering or just building something tangible; and 3) action – the cool thing about engineering is that it does not stop after we analyze things. We can go try it. We will fail sometimes, but we will learn to create and get better at it. Success is addictive!

Finally, I want to thank you teachers for what you do each day. I know some of the discussions about education are not easy to hear and you may feel like most people do not understand what you do. I want to let you know most of us in higher education do understand and appreciate the tremendous value you give to the leaders of tomorrow. So, thanks for making engineering and science a part of your curriculum and your programs. Your students will thank you forever and so will our state, and our country!

This talk was given as part of the SDO workshop in Cambridge, MD to PhD students and young scientists in solar and space physics.

This is a talk about career choices, the ones a person has to make after completing a PhD thesis. Graduate degrees at most research universities are often about training professors, but only a small minority of PhD graduates will in fact become professors at US universities. But, there are many careers that are enabled by a physics education.

During the last decade, in the US and Canada alone, we graduated approximately 475 PhDs in solar and space physics. Nearly 90 of these were focused on solar physics. During that decade, there were about 80 academic jobs advertised in SPA newsletters – an upper limit of the total jobs available. You get the point – statistically, your likelihood to get into a faculty in this field is approximately 1:6 or less. That’s actually pretty good odds, believe it or not.

Most proposals you are going to write to NASA or the NSF have smaller odds of getting funded and comparatively speaking, 1:6 is totally achievable as long as jobs keep popping up at a comparable rate as last year. So, what happens to the 5:6 scientists who do not end up in academia?

It turns out there are some very exciting and truly interesting careers enabled by such educations.  Some of them are in research, and my colleagues on the panel will talk about this. But, I want to talk about jobs in industry, and especially entrepreneurial careers. To illustrate the excitement of career trajectories, I want to tell you about two solar physicists I know personally.

The first one graduated from Stanford and then went and worked in a series of government jobs. First, she ran a DARPA advanced research program and then went to NASA as an associate administrator. And finally, she became the director of IARPA, a growing agency focused on intelligence and data in an ever-increasing digital world. She now joined Teledyne as a Senior Vice President. Teledyne is a leader in digital imaging, electronics and engineering systems.

The other scientist I know did a PhD focused on space instrumentation and calibration and then a postdoc focused on data analysis where he started playing around with internet-generated data. Soon, he figured out that people would pay him to do data analysis. He joined a small company and soon enough felt confined because he figured out that he was better than the other guys there. He then joined a university spinout focused on data as employee number 5 and he moved up the ranks as the company grew. Two years ago, he finally did it: with another physicist, he started a company that has grown to a total nearly 30 researchers, most of whom are either computer scientists or PhDs in astronomy or physics.
I could tell you more stories that show you a very coherent story: physicists have skills that are tremendously successful. There are some super-successful people like Elon Musk, who made his first fortune with Paypal, but has been using his background in physics and engineering as CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors. But, I typically find it tough to create career strategies based on 3-sigma outliers.

In a recent survey by the American Institute of Physics of physics PhD graduates between 1996 and 2001, nearly 1500 responded. Nearly 200 of these 192 were company founders – that’s almost 1:8 of the respondents. The dominant fields were electronics, medical devices and instrument systems.

Here are a few skills that keep coming up when I talk to entrepreneurs and business people about scientists and especially physicists:

-          Physicists are highly quantitative. That is needed in so many environments. Physicists are comfortable with numbers.

-          Physicists can model. It turns out that this is an art only few master. How do you build a model that has all necessary ingredients to get insights, but is not too complex to do anything?

-          Physicists are good with computers and with data. Many jobs, it turns out, are just straight-out data analysis jobs that require skills and techniques that are very natural to physicists.

And finally:

-          Physicists often have experience working in teams, even in many different time-zones. They may even have experiences abroad.

There is one more subtlety about startup physicists really get: It turns out there are tremendous analogies between the science methodology and the first phases of a startup. Most startups die because of lack of customers and that can be addressed by a process that is very familiar to scientists. Roughly speaking, the first phases of a startup are nothing more than hypothesis testing and quick learning – like a good research project. A startup team has a technology – let’s say – and hypothesizes that a certain business model can be used to address a need with a technology. A startup team will then get market data to test these hypotheses and to create market responses that allow checking these hypotheses.

So, my message to you is that first, there are tremendous opportunities for physicists today. I never regretted doing my PhD in physics as it opened tremendous opportunities because it created so many opportunities for me. It is, however, critical, to open these opportunities and learn the skills that allow you to take advantage of that. For US scientists, applying to I-Corps may be a great option, and learning the basics of customer development, perhaps by watching Steve Blank’s work.

To me, the most important aspect that drives scientists and also entrepreneurs is curiosity. Scientists imagine what is and what can be – so do entrepreneurs!

I never feel more alive and I am never more relaxed than when I am going down a slope on skis. Whether it is at 50 miles per hour going down a groomer, or in a technical terrain in cliffs or trees, skiing takes focus and challenges. Skiing for me is relaxing and thinking time that is critical for focused thinking and to refuel!

First and foremost, like many skiers, I deal with fear from time to time. When you enter that chute or bowl, you know that it would not be healthy to fall right now as you may never stop until you hit the bottom of the slope. Or, whether it is about maneuvering moguls, skiing is about challenging myself and also overcoming that initial fear and learning how to manage difficult terrain, or difficult people on the slopes.

Second, for me skiing is all about enjoying the outside. One of the days during my recent ski-trip the wind was so strong you could not see a single yard ahead of yourself. Nature at its toughest and nature at its wildest is also nature at its most beautiful. I skied with my son (who was pretty cold, but a good sport!) and we were the only ones around. And we felt the power of a winter storm – a feeling most people never know. Nature keeps amazing me, and especially the beauty of snow-covered landscapes.

Third, whenever I am out in the snow and the cold I think about “the why” – why do I do what I do? What am I about? I think that’s what nature does to us if we let it. I have friends who tell me that they have such thoughts in the desert, some of my friends tell me about these experiences diving under water. But for me, such deep experiences come in the mountains and especially in the cold mountains. That may actually be the most important reason that draws me into the mountains.

Fourth, I love activities with friends and family. I do not mind being by myself for a day or two, but I much love being with others and sharing the experiences with them. Shared experiences for me are always deeper experiences!

Yet, I know there are always reasons to not take time to go skiing, go diving or do whatever makes one think. But, such thinking times are critical for me and I suspect many of us: times that are challenging us, times that we truly enjoy and times that make us ask questions about “the why” of life and of our past and future, and times we share with friends and family.

And, I believe that is particularly true for entrepreneurs and leaders who want to create big positive impact in the world! We need these experiences to gain back strength, focus and also sanity!

This post is about stars – real stars, the kinds that are made out of hydrogen and helium and are burning in massive spheres of light the night sky. It may be a peculiar piece to many who are used to reading this blog for lessons about dreams, about education, about setting goals and achieving them through perseverance and leadership. It turns out this post will include these values, however it comes from one of my favorite sources – I learned about these issues from looking at the stars.

Recently, I was spending a weekend in Kirkwood California, with the Ski Innovators – a group of 30 or so University of Michigan alumni innovators who meet yearly to gain insights from each other. Kirkwood is a beautiful place; about a 1.5 hour drive from Reno, over a mountain pass. And Kirkwood is dark at night, much darker than the nights of most people. And, because of this darkness, I saw the stars and I thought about what they mean to me.

Stars have been my profession for the past 20 years. Mostly, I think about the Sun- our star – and I work with my colleagues to get new insights about its activity, about its atmosphere – the corona – and how this variable affects our life.  There are many absolutely mindboggling things about the Sun, its size, its age and its sheer beauty made visible mostly by space instruments developed during my lifetime. But what’s even more stunning to me is the thought that there is no way to imagine everything I know – the earth, my friends and family, and my wishes and desires – without the Sun.

Some of the most important questions are ones that I do not have good answers for, but which come from the interface of what I know – through the tools of science – and the questions that come from a different space that we cannot easily unlock with science experiments, no matter how sophisticated. And, to me, these questions have always been about dreams and aspirations: “what could I be?”, “what could the world be?”

I cannot help asking these questions when I look into a night-sky. I asked them as a child, sometimes for hours, sitting on the roof of our house in rural Switzerland. I still ask them today after a career of over 20 years thinking about stars and doing original research. I puzzle about the enormous size of the universe I see. Many stars I see at night may not exist anymore today – I only see them now because their light had to travel millions of years to get to me, and enter my eye. I feel at the same time utterly insignificant, and important like no one else. I am insignificant because I am not even a speck of dust in this universe. We now know that there are nearly countless stars like our Sun, and earth-like planets are found all over. There is very little that is unique about me when I look at the stars. But, at the same time, I just collected the light from the deep universe and I see the universe with me in it, thinking about it and enjoying its beauty. There are evenings when it feels like the stars shine for me alone.

This deeper, more wonderful understanding of stars comes from education, not from the absence thereof. Education allowed me to learn that we are flying through space around the Sun, and that the Sun itself is flying through our galaxy which is in turn one of billions of galaxies that contain some of the most wondrous objects. Some of them are dead stars, and some of them are stars that are exploding. But other objects defy our attempt to describe them in simple everyday language and we need the language of science to open new ways of understanding and description! The stars are a miracle – I knew that as a child – but today I understand so much more about this miracle than I did as a child, because I had the good fortune of education. Education does not take childhood dreams and hopes away like some people tend to say, they make childhood dreams bigger and more important.

And education also allows making such dreams a reality and achieving goals that are first imagined under the stars. As a child, I imagined understanding more, doing something important, something that would matter beyond my immediate circle. I looked at the stars and imagined seeing the world in the pursuit of these dreams and hopes. Education and perseverance made my dreams move from fantasies into something that is reality. I understand more now but not enough, that’s why I am still learning. In fact, there are things I learned as the first person in the entire world because I became a researcher who studies nature. The feeling of discovery is amazing – I know that first-hand. In addition, I do something important – not primarily by what I do each day, but by empowering hundreds and thousands of amazing people that I have the honor of meeting as part of my job as a professor and associate dean.

My most important satisfaction and strength today comes from meeting former students who also pursue their dream and when they tell me that I actually helped them and encouraged them. I keep a number of cards on my desk that I will read again if I feel bad about my daily struggles. In fact, sometimes they tell me the actual meeting or date that meant something important to them, even today. In trying to achieve my dream, I became something I never actually thought about – I started helping and leading others. That is not because I think I know better than them what they should be doing, it’s because I noticed really quickly that the only problems worth working on are ones that are bigger than what I could achieve all by myself. Once you get that, leadership is an enabler for that change.

Last week, I looked at the stars in Kirkwood, surrounded by important people who have their own lives and hopes for the future, and I felt so deeply happy about knowing them as former students or knowing them because of their love for the University of Michigan. But, I also felt gratitude for the many people who taught me the tools that lets me see more when I look at stars, be in awe and disbelief about nature.

You may have something else in your life that gives you the view about the world and yourself that I get from stars. If not – find it! Perhaps for you it is in the desert. Perhaps it is in the mountains, or near the sea. Let yourself inspire and do not shut yourself off the questions that come up in your mind when you are in this space, especially if they stretch what you know and have experienced thus far.

And, for those of you who are thinking about being teachers, mentors and educators – if you can truly do it for the right reasons, it is one of the best jobs in the world. You get a front row view of others going after their dreams, their struggles and their successes that go well beyond anybody’s wildest imaginations. And, if you do not believe that, go hang out with some University of Michigan alumni …

If you are an alumni and want to reconnect to your alma mater, use the many programs of the MconneX initiative to learn about what’s new, to meet other alumni and give back as a volunteer and mentor or otherwise!

This is a speech given as part of the opening of the CFE space in the Shapiro library.

On behalf of the Center for Entrepreneurship and the campus wide entrepreneurial community, I am excited to open this space. In doing so, the campus leadership is showing its belief in three key principles:

• The tremendous power of innovation and entrepreneurship that come from our student teams and organizations. Most people underestimate that power. “Students are inexperienced,” the nice ones say, the others say “They are crazy!” We recognize that it’s those very crazy people, working as a powerful team, that will create new opportunities and solve old problems. We believe in the power of innovation and entrepreneurship of our students!
•  The importance of such leadership of entrepreneurial experiences as part of a Michigan education. Our students prepare for a lifetime of changes that will happen at a rate nearly unprecedented in history. Some of these changes are technology induced, some of them by the rapid evolution of an ever-flat world. We believe that these experiences on campus allow students to take control of their destiny and chart sometimes stormy waters. You cannot learn sailing without putting your ship into the sea and you cannot learn how to make innovative ideas a reality without practicing that. This is why we believe in the importance of entrepreneurial experiences as part of the complete education at Michigan.
•  The importance of following up with actions what we say with words. At U-M, such ideas are not just part of a theoretical discourse. By making space available, U-M proves that we mean it. Yes, we encourage your ideas and yes we are willing to allocate precious space and resources for it.

This, of course, is part of broader agenda we are all experiencing:

• This week, edudemic released a list of 10 innovative universities shaking up education and U-M is in that list, for the first time. Years ago, we did not deserve to be there, now we are and I believe that our student innovation programs will drive us up that list and many other lists of importance.
•  This Friday, MHacks, a student organization is hosting the biggest hackathon anywhere. This student led activity believes in the power of creativity and can-do attitude. Well-done is better than well-said, said Franklin. The hackathon is a 21^st century realization of that.
• And, we are building a campus-wide academic program to accompany the co-curricular activities we are doing here. The CFE has built many of these classes, but we seek to translate them into a program that is even more connected to the campus and its diverse strengths. So, regarding educational objectives: the best is still to come!

Thanks to provost office, thanks to library leadership and staff, and thanks to student orgs that have helped us. Students, please use the space, give feedback and help us make this a place you will think about after you graduate into an amazing career that was enabled by the very activities you worked on right here!

This year, the College of Engineering ran a different promotion and tenure process than in years past: it specifically included entrepreneurial activities in all three aspects of the experience of a tenured professor – in teaching, in research and in service. In doing so, Michigan Engineering is affecting the most important part of its future – its tenured workforce, and encourages them to be entrepreneurial. 

Promotions and tenure decisions are made through a complicated process that starts in each faculty’s home department, and is ultimately made by the so-called executive committee of the College, a group of elected faculty members. Decisions are then sent to the provost office where final recommendations are put together for approval by the University’s board of regents. Rarely do the last two steps differ from the decision of the College’s executive committee. 

The importance of a tenure decision is easy to understand: based on current salaries, a tenure decision is for a university commitment of $5-6M – that’ s a massive amount of money! We cannot screw them up and that’s why – traditionally – the tenure and promotion process has been the most conservative aspect of universities – sometimes holding them back from adapting and changing with the time!

As a brief summary of the process (check here for details), professors at research universities generally are judged in three areas. Are they great teachers? Are they excellent researchers? And, do they excel in service – their work as volunteers on behalf of their community etc.? To respond to these questions, a document of well over 100 pages is assembled that summarizes each candidate’s work and plans in each of these areas. Part of that are also letters from more or less randomly picked students, colleagues and the best experts in the field of research the candidate is active in. 

During the past few years, a slow but powerful change has been occurring that profoundly affected this year’s promotions and tenure decisions and the decisions in future years, as mentioned above: it included entrepreneurial impact as a specific and key part of all three aspects of the promotion material, the so-called casebook.

For example, instead of just counting research and publications, the casebook asked for specific inputs to “contributions to technology transfer and entrepreneurship.” Similarly, under service contributions, the casebook specifically asks for “consulting and startup activities.” And, under teaching, the casebooks ask for mentorship of student teams, which includes student companies and entrepreneurial student organizations. Yet, there is one part of the promotion process, which perhaps was the most impactful: for each promotion a series of letters are requested from the best researchers all around the world. Here is the specific question each one of them as asked: “How would you evaluate the candidate’s broader impact in entrepreneurship or business through startup, consulting, technology transfer or other relevant activities?” 

It was almost funny and highly instructive to see the answers to these questions. Some of our faculty members are serial entrepreneurs and innovators with extremely strong records and the answer to that question put on record the strongest testimony of these professors with respect to how they are affecting the world. 

But, there were some funny parts of these letters from some of our more old-fashioned colleagues in rather “stuffy” organizations. “Entrepreneurship – really? What do you mean  – entrepreneurship?” To them we want to answer: “Yes, dear colleagues, we are a university that values their entrepreneurial faculty and strives to maximize their entrepreneurial impact.”

I have to say that I am extremely proud of the college leadership and the executive committee whom I worked with to achieve this change. I think it is a hugely important change, and one that will make us a better and more competitive college and university. Some of our best young faculty are our most entrepreneurial ones and we better be sure that we can hold on to that talent for the benefit of our students and our community as a whole.

At the University of Michigan, there are over 300 invention reports each year that come primarily from the College of Engineering and the School of Medicine. But out of these inventions only a dozen startup companies each year get created. I am one of many researchers and university administrators who think that is not nearly enough – not even close. Interestingly, the best universities in the world are only better by a factor of 2 as compared to U-M. So, this is not some kind of U-M problem, it is a systemic challenge facing universities around the US: How do we create more entrepreneurial outcomes from our research in a way that makes us better universities overall?

It turns out this is one of the most important questions research universities around the country are addressing and getting this right will determine, in part, whether or not the US will be a leading innovator worldwide and continue to give birth to the most innovative industries that shape our future.

We can explore history to see that innovative spirit in an article published in 1945 by Vannevar Bush – his descriptions published at the end of a gruesome war are like prophecies, many of which have come true! Or, we can listen to Kennedy’s speeches to congress at Rice on September 12, 1962: “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people…Every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant {must give} his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space.”
There are other examples I could use here, but it is clear that global innovation leadership relates to three characteristics: vision, initiative, and speed. These are the characteristics that underlie the University of Michigan’s Master of Entrepreneurship program; a groundbreaking technology commercialization graduate degree program offered jointly by the top ranked Michigan College of Engineering and Ross School of Business. Why do I think this is important?

The vision behind the Master of Entrepreneurship program is to create a one year translation boot camp and startup clinic that simultaneously achieves two purposes: it educates much-needed entrepreneurial talent and it enables “shots on goal” targeting a commercial outcome. The action-based curriculum is unique in the world – pooling the resources of top-ten business and engineering programs and the biggest research program of any public university in the US.

The initiative to transform an invention into a scalable venture is critical to entrepreneurial success. Master of Entrepreneurship students don’t spend the year sitting in the classroom; from day one, they are putting what they learn into action. Students work with real world technologies, some invented by U-M researchers, others by the students themselves. All year, students are talking to customers, searching for business models, and exploring the commercial potential of these technologies.

The speed of this activity will become evident when looking at the educational program on the site, and especially when talking to our students in class #1. When talking about entrepreneurial activity, speed is of fundamental importance to create leadership.

When I was getting a PhD in a STEM discipline, I always wanted to attend such a program so I could learn how to make my inventions and research results more meaningful and useful. Unfortunately, it did not exist. Frankly, I believe that PhD students and recent graduates who may or may not have their own inventions will benefit tremendously from this.

Do you want to learn how to develop entrepreneurial ideas and truly take a shot on goal? This program is for you. And, the educational value of this degree will carry you far beyond this year and equip you with a toolset needed in an industry that requires continuous innovation of the type at the heart of this program.

To get more information or to apply to the program, check out entrepreneurship.umich.edu.