Gonzaga and EWU focus on entrepreneurship

Universities add programs to help students identify opportunities, take risks

By Addy Hatch Spokane Journal of Business

Paul Buller, director of Gonzaga University’s Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program, says a total of about 100 students will be enrolled in the program in the fall.

Innovation and risk-taking are qualities that mark a successful entrepreneur.

They’re also qualities that are important to the growth of the economy, representatives of Gonzaga University and Eastern Washington University say. Accordingly, both schools in recent years have implemented major new educational programs to teach entrepreneurship, joining a nationwide trend.

Gonzaga’s 3-year-old Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program for undergraduates currently has about 75 students enrolled, and will add another 25 to 28 students in the fall, says Paul Buller, director of the program at the private Jesuit university. The Hogan school now is adding a student-run business-development service, and it would like to expand its offerings to graduate-level education in the future, Buller says.

Last October, EWU created a Center for Entrepreneurial Activities that will begin offering graduate-level courses this summer through the university’s College of Business and Public Administration, says Bob Schwartz, co-director of the center. On the drawing board are plans to expand its offerings to undergraduates and to specialize in Native American entrepreneurship, Schwartz says.

The schools cite different motivations in starting their entrepreneurship programs, but they’re part of a much larger trend. According to a recent study on the impact of entrepreneurship education, sponsored by the Kansas City, Mo.-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, more than 1,500 colleges and universities now offer entrepreneurship courses, up from a handful 15 years ago, and there are more than 100 university-based entrepreneurship centers in the U.S.

Hogan, Spitzer hit if off

The Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program came about through something of a fluke. Ed Hogan, an entrepreneur who turned a New Jersey travel agency into a multimillion-dollar travel conglomerate named Pleasant Travel Services Inc., heard a presentation by Gonzaga President Father Robert Spitzer, who speaks widely on issues of ethical leadership.

Hogan later contacted Spitzer to tell him he “felt like they had similar ideas and visions,” Buller says. “They really hit it off in terms of vision.”

Hogan, through a family foundation, offered $2.5 million to establish an entrepreneurship program at Gonzaga and the school moved quickly to set up such a program, Buller says.

Gonzaga’s Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership program is offered to undergraduate students in all disciplines as an adjunct to their core studies. Of the three classes of students who have entered the program so far, roughly a third are business students, a third are arts-and-sciences majors, 27 percent are in engineering, and 4 percent are majoring in education, the school says. When students involved in the program graduate, their transcripts will carry a notation that they had a “concentration in entrepreneurial leadership.”

Buller says Gonzaga decided to offer the Hogan program to all Gonzaga undergraduates because the school believes business doesn’t have a lock on entrepreneurial spirit in the post-collegiate world.

“We think of an entrepreneur as someone who assumes the risk of a new enterprise or a new venture. Someone who will take the lead, (who) likes action,” he says.

The Hogan program’s mission dovetails with the Jesuit philosophy of using one’s gifts for the betterment of the world, Buller adds.

Gonzaga is choosy about who it accepts into the Hogan program, requiring that prospective participants have SAT scores, and demonstrated leadership, creativity, and service to others.

“We don’t just look for the nerds,” Buller says.

First- and second-year classes provide a foundation in entrepreneurship and an introduction to accounting and economics, so that later, a student of any major will be more ready to evaluate an entrepreneurial opportunity, Buller says. Third-year students are expected to intern at an entrepreneurial organization, which for this year’s students ranges from a biotechnology startup to an antiques retailer. In their fourth year, students must develop a business plan.

The first group of Hogan students will graduate from the program in 2004, and Buller says, “The real proof in the pudding will be to see what happens to students next year when they leave.”

Until then, the Hogan program, like a new business, is evolving, he says.

“We’re a startup and we’re trying to emulate things you do in a startup.”

EWU’s Center for Entrepreneurial Activities came about as an offshoot of the Cheney-based public university’s focus on “the engaged university,” Schwartz says.

“Steve Jordan (the school’s president) came five years ago and said we should be engaged” with the community, Schwartz says. EWU launched its entrepreneurship program to help bolster the region’s and the state’s flagging economies, he says.

“Historically, there have been more new jobs created from small firms than from the Fortune 500,” Schwartz says. “We think Eastern has, is, and can make a significant economic-development difference for the region.”

The school earlier this year received a $50,000 grant from the prestigious Kauffman foundation to support the development of entrepreneurship courses within EWU’s Master’s of Business Administration program. The MBA entrepreneurship program also received a $50,000 cash gift from an anonymous donor.

Schwartz says the money is being used for faculty and curriculum development for the program. MBA-level entrepreneurship courses offered through the new center will be introduced this summer, and he says he expects about half of the school’s about 125 MBA students to take entrepreneurship courses during the 2003-2004 school year.

As part of its policy of engaging the community, EWU’s Center for Entrepreneurial Activities plans to offer workshops and seminars on different topics related to business and entrepreneurship, and would like to hold an economic-development conference in the fall, Schwartz says. Later this month, the center will host its first “celebration of entrepreneurship,” a breakfast meeting at which it will honor onetime EWU student Jeff Potter, CEO of Denver-based Frontier Airlines, as its Entrepreneur of the Year.

The center also would like to establish a business-resource center staffed by a full-time business-resource specialist, Schwartz says.

“I probably get one to three calls a week … to assist the community in different ways,” he says. EWU has helped businesses in the past, and that practice will continue, but with the prospective business-resource center, “it’ll be a little bit more organized, a little more formal,” Schwartz says.

Because public universities nationwide are facing a cash crunch—and universities in Washington state are no exception—further expansion of the Center for Entrepreneurial Activities likely will be funded through grants and other outside funding sources, he says.

Schwartz says he hopes to add an undergraduate component to the center within the next three to four years, “but first we need to have a fully functioning graduate-level program.”

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