Seeding Entrepreneurship across Campus: Early Implementation Experiences of the Kauffman Campuses Initiative. Final Report

Although entrepreneurship has long been considered a fundamental aspect of American society, its development as an academic field in U.S. colleges and universities is relatively recent and on-campus entrepreneurship programs have been most commonly found in business schools. Because entrepreneurs and innovative ideas can arise from within any academic discipline, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has encouraged the expansion of entrepreneurship programs and activities to provide educational opportunities in entrepreneurship to all students, regardless of their field, in eight U.S. universities. The current document is a report of an in-depth implementation study of the initiatives developed on the eight campuses, designed to provide insight and documentation for other universities considering implementing campus-wide entrepreneurship initiatives and to provide the original Kauffman Campuses Initiative (KCI) universities with feedback to help them refine their initiatives. Each of the universities made different decisions about how to integrate program initiatives into existing operational structures, what types of institutional and community members to involve in oversight and guidance, and what resources to direct to the program. New entrepreneurship programs were developed and existing ones expanded to create a broad range of entrepreneurship education opportunities for university students, faculty, and the surrounding community. Developing entrepreneurship curriculum was a major component of the initiatives. Other program components included co-curricular activities that support and develop entrepreneurial interests, faculty development activities, research opportunities, and community outreach. Most of the KCI universities emphasized expanding the availability of entrepreneurship curriculum to engage students outside the business school and identified three major challenges in doing so: (1) Attracting faculty to develop and teach courses, (2) Addressing the university's long approval process for new courses, and (3) Overcoming procedural barriers to student enrollment. Other key issues to be considered by other universities as they plan and implement their own entrepreneurship programs include: (1) Establishing a clear identity for the initiative; (2) Successfully implementing the initiative's programs and activities; and (3) Planning to ensure sustainability of the initiative. The following are appended: (1) Site Visit Methodology; and (2) Faculty Survey Methodology. (Contains 1 figure and 12 tables.)