Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at the BusinessMakers.com. And now it's time for the BusinessMakers Flashback - today featuring leaders from four of the country's leading college and university based entrepreneurship programs, first up from Episode 75 back in 2006 when the BusinessMakers visited The University of Southern California and interviewed the then Director and Chair of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurship Professor Thomas O'Malia, we enter the discussion where I asked Tom to tell us about the program at USC.

Thomas: We in Southern California have been very fortunate to always be at the fore front, the bleeding edge, of Entrepreneurial change and way back in the middle 60s the University of Southern California's business schools offered courses in what today would be called Entrepreneurship. A group of graduates of the program came back to the dean in the late 60s and said ""We've wasted 10 years going from your classical education to being able to become entrepreneurs and presidents of our own companies and we think you ought to be able to put something in your curriculum to deal with this."" So in 1971, six years before Apple, eight years before Microsoft and eleven years before the IBM PC the University of Southern California Business School had an Entrepreneurial program.

Russ: Later on in the discussion we were talking about several big time success stories that had come through USC, Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinkos, Christopher DeWolfe of MySpace and Mark Benioff of Sales Forcec.om and I asked him if when he's in front of a class, does he sense that he's looking at other major success stories of the future.

Thomas: It's really the people who are willing to avoid the event and start the journey and by that I mean I probably meet a thousand people every year that have one great idea and their gonna take it and their gonna be billionaires by Tuesday and we never hear from em past Wednesday. The real people are these are people that started the journey and as opportunities came up they were able to take advantage of it, most of them it's their second or third venture and it's one of the hallmarks of what a successful entrepreneurs about. They will take 2.3 ventures to be successful.

Russ: Interesting answer, next up we move to third quarter of 2008 when I visited Babson College in Massachusetts for the inauguration of their new President, Dr. Leonard Schlesinger. And I started by asking him what is it about Babson that sets it apart.

Leonard: Well I mean at the end of the day this is the school that's all about entrepreneurial thought and action and the history of dealing with those kinds of issues not only is related to our founder Roger Babson, who is obsessed about these kinds of ideas but a clear strategic positioning for this school that was chosen in 1978 with the first courses in entrepreneurship, the creation of the Academy of Distinguished Entrepreneurs and a number of other activities where we were absolutely first in the world of business education to be able to stimulate the business plan competition etc. So now we find ourselves 30 years later having been evaluated by most of our peer institutions as #1 for Entrepreneurship in the world.

Russ: Babson is unique in many ways. For me, the most impressive is the extended role that the faculty plays in the student's businesses, I asked him to tell us about that.

Leonard: One of the things I'm fond of saying about Babson, and it's real it is what makes this place incredibly special and differentiated from other schools and when the rating services call me for commentary on it I'm very kind of comfortable saying the following. There are lots of great schools that teach business and teach entrepreneurship . Babson's the only one I've ever seen that lives it. It's really in the water. Ok? And people have really drunk the Kool-Aid in this institution. We have people who live business start ups 24 hours a day that are living in co-located residential choice living here called E Tower. We have faculty that are actively involved as Angel Investors. We have 70 members of our faculty that are reflective practitioners who are here in addition their professional activities only because they derive an enormous amount of satisfaction from being engaged and helping to stimulate young people and kind of being able to play with ideas and make things happen. And so whether it's in the classroom, outside of the classroom, in the living environment, in the break rooms, in the seminars, in the activities.. and quiet honestly here in the first year the required course in the freshman program is called Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship where every single student in this community is forced into a team. We stake them all three thousand dollars to start a business and the core learning of the first year of the program is to actually start a business and either succeed or fail and really reflect on the experience of that process.

Russ: Next up in early summer of 2008, I sat down with Kenneth Morse, Senior Lecturer and Managing Director of the Mit Entrepreneurship Center and I asked Ken to give us an overview of The MIT Entrepreneurship Center.

Ken: We believe that entrepreneurship is a contact sport and we work with all of the different schools and departments across MIT, so engineering, science, architecture, media, and also the Sloan Business School. We have grown to where we have about 1,500 students a year taking entrepreneurship courses. I have about 30 faculty, 20 of whom are practitioners and 10 of whom are paid and tenure track. They're teaching about 30 courses now ranging from energy ventures, how to start new companies in the energy field, to entrepreneurial finance, to raising early stage capital, and of course entrepreneurial marketing and sales. The sales class has been going for seven years, has created a large following. It's over-subscribed both in the fall and the spring semester, as are most of our courses, and it's making an impact. We interview our students five years after they graduate to make sure that we're teaching the right stuff. Many of them tell us that the sales class has enabled them to advance much more rapidly in their companies and also to position them to start their own earlier, which is the goal. We've just updated the study to where we have documented about 20,000 companies that have been started by MIT alumni with over $250 billion in annual sales. I guess they would be the 27th largest economy in the world, same size as Thailand or South Africa if these start-ups were measured together.

Russ: So, then I asked what was his favorites success story that had come through the program, and here's what he said.

Ken: I would say that my favorite success story is that over 100 companies have been started by the business plan competition alone, and it's a favorite because it isn't just the companies who win but also the runners up and the semi-finalists who decide that with modification that their idea is worth going with, and there is no difference at least at MIT between the winners and the runners up in terms of their eventual stock market performance. Akamai, which had a market cap of $16 billion at the height of the bubble didn't win the business plan competition, so for me what I'm proud of is the fact that we've moved the needle on the whole culture of the place. 40 percent of the students who applied to the Sloan Business School this year said they intended to have careers in high tech entrepreneurship. That's significant, and I think it's good for the nation's economy as well.

Russ: From there we move to the later part of 2008 when I had the opportunity to talk with the founder of the University based program that was ranked #1 by Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine in 2008, and that was Bill Sherrill founder of the University of Houston's Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship, which incidentally first showed up in the national rankings only the year before as #2. I started off by asking Bill if he had ever envisioned the program being ranked like this.

Bill: Not at all. Had big dreams but.. not this big.

Russ: Well, I mean, I know it's just a contest but boy you gotta be proud about it.

Bill: Really proud because you know there's so many people have worked so hard over this 15 years, to have it validated by a prestigious group like Princeton Review, is really fulfilling.

Russ: And finally, we fast forward to just 3 weeks ago, when I interviewed Bill Sherrill once again, because well, as you will hear from this exchange, The Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship has done it again.

Russ: Now we're here because once again this program has gotten national ranking and I mean numero uno. For 2010 the Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston is rated by the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine as the best in the country. Bill congratulations once again.

Bill: Thank you Russ.

Russ: That is incredible. Now but before I get you to talk about it 2010 number one, 2009 number two, 2008 number one and 2007 number two. What the heck happened in 2006?

Bill: Well we just were warming up Russ.

Russ: Great, great. Bill that is so incredible.

Bill: Well I think we have the most comprehensive program. We have a method that we use here to really take students and teach them how to take ideas and turn them into businesses and that's very creative. Having an idea is important. That's what inventors do but an entrepreneur has a superior talent in how to turn that idea into a business. It takes a lot more creativity to do that.

Russ: Okay. A lot more creativity to turn one into business than it does to have the idea.

Bill: Exactly.

Russ: What a class act, and what a great program....ok and that wraps up today's BusinessMakers Flashback, you're listening to the BusienssMakers Show heard here and seen online at TheBusinessMakers.com.