For business schools, entre­pre­neur­ship is a bridge to other parts of campus

There’s also economic incentive. College students are graduating with mounting levels of debt only to find a tight job market. Many cannot find work or must settle for jobs outside their career of choice.

“A lot of schools have been forced by economic times to be more entrepreneurial, otherwise their students aren’t going to make a living,” said Bob Litan, vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation.

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(Jeffrey MacMillan/Capital Business) - David Thomas, dean of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, is raising a $50,000 “seed fund” to pay for development of courses on entrepreneurship in academic departments outside of the business school.

(Jeffrey MacMillan/Capital Business) - American University students Salman Dossoni, left, and Warren Flood participate in the Global Entrepreneurship class, taught by Richard Linowes, at the university’s Kogod School of Business.

Professors at American University have submitted to the board of trustees a new graduate program in media entre­pre­neur­ship, which if approved could begin enrolling students this fall. The program combines course work from the schools of business and communication in an effort to find fresh ways of delivering the news.

The interdisciplinary program is one of many that the business school offers, either on its own or in partnership with other departments. Stevan Holmberg, chair of the management department, said the blend of academic backgrounds also pushes traditional business students to think more broadly.

“One of the challenges I think is to help business students become even more creative and somewhat reflective on what their own mind-sets are,” Holmberg said. “How you see the world, how you filter data, all of that influences whether you look at a problem and see opportunities.”

The curriculum for the pending media entre­pre­neur­ship program, despite its name, is rooted heavily in the core disciplines of business, Holmberg said. Students will be expected to complete courses in finance, management and marketing.

“We think they’ll come out with a much richer understanding of the business skills and competencies they’ll need to be successful if they start a new media venture,” Holmberg said.

A new discipline

The influential Kauffman Foundation also helped set this trend in motion through its Kauffman Campus initiative, which was started in 2003 to provide colleges with grants for cross-campus programs. Eighteen universities have shared in $50 million so far.

But the lessons from that effort, which is now in its final year, have been less tangible than the organization anticipated.

“When you’re dealing with young people, it’s not just entrepreneurship that’s important,” said John Courtin, a vice president at Kauffman. “There’s a whole suite of skills you have to develop.”

Kauffman’s Litan said the program has not yet had a discernible effect on the number of start-ups being formed. Furthermore, entrepreneurship and how it’s taught was interpreted differently at almost every school, making it difficult to generate meaningful data about what really works.

Many business schools in the Washington region have added start-up incubators, elevator pitch competitions and other hands-on activities outside the classroom in recent years. Litan said these often prove more successful than instruction alone.

“Not many schools teach a course that basically has the kids think up an idea and actually implement it while they’re in the course,” he said. “That’s really hard to do in three and a half months.”

The question has also been raised about how much of a curriculum entre­pre­neur­ship ought to consume. Students often need expertise in a particular subject matter before creating a business from scratch, lending further support to the idea of interdisciplinary programs.

“I would not send my kid to major in entre­pre­neur­ship,” Litan said matter-of-factly.

Instead, he and Courtin said schools that incorporate entre­pre­neur­ship into current fields of study or as a minor program often provide the most effective balance. After all, every student, including those that study entre­pre­neur­ship, need a backup plan.

“One of the things that seemed inherent in our Kauffman Campus program is we wanted everyone to be the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates,” Courtin said. “You just can’t scale a business if you don’t have a lot of people whose career it is going to be to not be the founding entrepreneur. That’s another thing that I think we learned quietly from this process.”