US West

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Connie Bourassa-Shaw, Director

Dr. Suresh Kotha, Faculty Director

The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which is housed in the Michael G. Foster School of Business, promotes learning and discovery in innovation and entrepreneurship to students—from undergraduates to PhD candidates—across the University of Washington. The Center, which was founded in 1991, recognizes that entrepreneurs come from all disciplines, and the mandate of CIE is to provide the education, real-world experiences, and connections that make it possible for students and faculty at the UW to achieve their entrepreneurial goals.

Entrepreneurship Curriculum

Within the Business School, CIE offers 18-credit certificate programs for undergraduate students (tracks in venture creation and business growth) and graduate students (tracks in venture creation and technology commercialization). For graduate non-business students, the Center has a 20-credit Technology Entrepreneurship Certificate, which places master’s level and PhD students  from other disciplines in the same classes as our own MBAs. This cross-disciplinary integration is one of the reasons why so many technology-based start-ups have emerged from UW’s annual Business Plan Competition. The Foster School of Business is also one of the few schools to offer a PhD program in technology entrepreneurship, which is available to non-business PhDs as a minor.

·         Percentage of all MBAs who take at least 1 ENTRE course                             87% (of 698)

·         Number of Technology Entrepreneurship Certificate students                   74

·         Business PhD students specializing in Technology Entrepreneurship        6

The curriculum covers the basics of entrepreneurship (strategy, finance, marketing, sales, leadership and decision-making), and offers additional study in venture capital investment, technology commercialization, open innovation, software entrepreneurship, and environmental innovation.

The Center’s Entrepreneurial Activities

CIE’s mission is to integrate entrepreneurship into the fabric of the University. In addition to the curriculum, we offer a variety of real-world activities and experiences that expand students’ understanding and capacity to succeed as entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs.

The cornerstone of CIE is its annual Business Plan Competition, which is open to all degree-seeking students from Washington State colleges and universities. The competition’s timeline begins in the fall with a science and technology showcase and continues during winter with every Thursday evening “Resource Nights” for networking and business plan preparation. In the spring, teams submit their plans, develop their elevator pitches, make investor presentations, and are judged by more than 300 Seattle area investors and entrepreneurs.  The competition awards $75,000 annually in seed funding.

• Since the first event in 1998, more than 2,010 students have participated in the competition, and CIE has provided $757,000 in seed funding to 71 student companies.  We estimate that 28% of the teams that make it to our Sweet 16 Round launch their companies.

Other major student activities

·         In the last five years, the University of Washington has won the national Venture Capital Investment Competition at UNC twice (2004 and 2006) and came in second in 2008. The Center’s Venture Capital Investment course attracted more than 90 students in fall 2008.

·         Technology Commercialization Summer Fellows. In collaboration with UW TechTransfer and funded by WRF Capital and the Coulter Foundation, CIE students work with faculty inventors and Tech managers to do a feasibility analysis of a promising technology, identify potential markets, and recommend a course of action.

·         The Entrepreneurial Law Clinic provides very early-stage technology entrepreneurs with both legal and business consulting services under the direction of Law School and CIE center directors/faculty.

·         Springboard brings the founders of early-stage and venture-backed companies to campus to network with entrepreneurship students for internships and permanent positions. In 2008 nearly 50 companies and 175 students participated in the event.

• EntrepreneurWeek UW is a week-long series of 8 to 10 events in November designed to highlight entrepreneurship as a career choice for business and non-business students.

The new UW Environmental Innovation Challenge, which launched in fall 2008, asserts that substantive change can only take place when “environment” meets “business,” when “invention” meets “opportunity.” Student teams from disciplines such as science and engineering, the environ-ment, business, and law work collaboratively to identify a specific problem within the 2008 challenge theme of water, and create a simple yet elegant solution that includes a prototype/proof of concept, as well as an executive summary that defines the market opportunity and business model.

The UWEIC’s objective is to create an effective platform for stimulating innovation and encouraging and focusing student creativity and talent on some of society’s most pressing problems. What’s more, the challenge leverages the momentum behind the University’s strong track record in environmentally related research and its extensive entrepreneurial culture. More information on the challenge can be found at http://eic.washington.edu. 

Faculty Entrepreneurship and Research in Technology Entrepreneurship

For science and engineering faculty at the University of Washington, CIE has created From Invention to Start-Up, a speaker series that focuses on the entrepreneurial process within a research university. The premise of the series is to explore how a faculty-led team, with an invention or innovation, can access the capital, talent, and resources necessary to create a successful high-tech company.

• In the two years that CIE, in partnership with TechTransfer and the Applied Physics Laboratory, has offered the series, more than 575 faculty from 37 departments have attended one or more sessions. More than 3,700 complete downloads of the series’ videos have been recorded.

Since 2003 the University of Washington CIE, in collaboration with Stanford, USC, Oregon, and Berkeley, has produced the West Coast Research Symposium and Doctoral Consortium in Technology Entrepreneurship.  This annual two-day conference attracts faculty and doctoral students across the United States and internationally, and features 18 to 20 new research papers on technology entrepreneurship each fall—papers that are subsequently submitted to academic research journals.

For More Information

Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Foster School of Business, University of Washington

www.bschool.washington.edu/cie

206 685-9868