Commercial Viability and Commercial Applications?

It's interesting to see how the different departments at CU work together. Larry interviewed Paul Jerde who has been with the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship for 15+ years, and he says he was pretty naive. "I had come to have some strong ideas about the positioning of the value of entrepreneurship education in the university setting. What I found was people lit up at the mention, something exciting about an entrepreneur, I guess. But the tendency is to very narrowly define it. To some people it means just small business. To some it means bleeding edge technology and to some it means insane risk taking. To others, it's only about startups. So, at the core of our philosophy is the belief and the positioning of the way that our faculty work, and we work with faculty and students. The value of entrepreneurship education, at the core, has fundamental value for the students in almost any particular discipline."

Paul is often challenged... can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur? Can you teach someone entrepreneurship? Paul says no to the first. I don't believe, nor should you try to teach someone to be an entrepreneur. Other things cause that to come about. But you can absolutely teach the skills. And at the core of entrepreneurship education is teaching our students to answer the question when someone says, 'I have an idea, what do I do with it?' Here's what you do - 'That's an interesting idea. Does it have commercial viability? Does it have commercial applications?' Well, most people in the world don't really know. And that's what we want our students to have. They know what feasibility, analysis and market assessment is all about. They know about doing due diligence, how to go through a really rigorous and in-depth process in determining whether an idea can translatable into a commercial opportunity. The business planning part of this has to do with the integrating of different disciplines...finance, marketing, operations, strategy management, and so forth - bringing those all together.

More broadly in our cross campus entrepreneurship program it's getting teams of students to work together to appreciate the ideas may come from the creative departments or from the engineers who can actually build something, or from the scientists who can actually discover something - but often times they don't know what to do with their new invention or new discovery. We try to make these 'productive collisions' of teams of students and in general find people of different expertise's come together around the idea of how do you allow an idea to flourish. There's much more...