Start Us Up
Juniata's Businss Curriculum Stirs in Entrepreneurialism
Christi Spackman '06 joined an Internet startup business, Grandma's Attic, as a freshman at Juniata. The senior from Warren, Pa. went on to work on an internship as a legislative aide for her local state representative and with Empire Building Diagnostics. This year, she's working as student assistant for business professor Jim Donaldson and recently returned from the National Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization Conference in Orlando, Fla., where she networked with current student business owners and entrepreneurs.
"One of the great things about the entrepreneurial curriculum is that the strategies are the same fundamental concepts you learn for working in any business," Spackman says. "No matter what you end up doing as a career, you will take skills away from the entrepreneur program that will help you for the rest of your life.
Spackman and increasing numbers of students like her are flocking to the College's business department to get in on the ground floor of Juniata's revamped entrepreneurial curriculum. At least 10 freshmen enrolled in 2005 as entrepreneurial POEs in the first year of that option, and that number is certain to rise as faculty in other disciplines begin to incorporate concepts of entrepreneurial learning into courses. "We've been teaching some aspect of entrepreneurialism-we called it small business management then-since I came here in 1979," explains Jim Donaldson '67.
In summer 2005, Donaldson and three other Juniata faculty redesigned existing courses to more fully explore the principles behind new business creation and management. This wholesale makeover was driven by a $144,000 grant from the Coleman Foundation, which has designated funds to incorporate entrepreneurial curriculum into the College's business, science and humanities departments. Juniata is one of just 12 institutions across the country to receive the grant.
"The long-range plan has always been to increase the level of hands-on and experiential learning in all parts of Juniata's curriculum," says Dr. Michael Lehman '94, executive director of Juniata College Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, who oversees the grant.
Donaldson concentrated on two courses, the three-stage Hands-on Entrepreneurial Leadership Lab and New Venture Creation. In the entry-level lab course, Donaldson restructured the course to center on two economic clusters that are important to Huntingdon County: tourism and wood products. "One of the problems in the lab had been that students tend to have the same ideas, which is usually to open a sports bar or a restaurant," Donaldson says with a laugh. "We wanted to break that mold and get students out of that type of standardized thinking."
Lights, Camera, Business Grant!
Seeing will be believing for potential business builders as Juniata uses an anonymous $150,000 grant to create a database of filmed interviews with successful entrepreneurs that can be accessed by students and clients of JCEL.
The database of interviews is the first phase of a project to create advanced business courses and courseware for people with little or no business background. Eventually the grant will pay for courseware that is also being designed for off-campus potential entrepreneurs who will receive "virtual" services from Juniata via the Internet.
Juniata students Julia Williams '07, of Schellsburg, Pa., and Demitri Patitsas '07, of Huntingdon, Pa., filmed and interviewed 52 entrepreneurs who have created enterprises within the last four years. "I was simply amazed at what all these people were laying on the line to start their business," Williams says. "I think entrepreneurs can gain insight on what to do, what not to do, and what to look out for in the years ahead."
The interviews each lasted at least an hour and covered business questions as diverse as marketing, finance, accounting, operational, regulatory and personnel issues. Transferred to DVD and indexed by John Dawes '09, of Alexandria, Pa., each interview is completely searchable and will be transferred to a Juniata Web site. Some of the alumni entrepreneurs from the film project have subsequently agreed to serve as mentors for entrepreneurial business courses.
The new curriculum is designed to teach business principles and skills to nonbusiness students, creating a steady stream of successful Juniata alumni entrepreneurs with diverse disciplines to add to an already impressive list.
-Mike Keating, director of corporation and foundation support
"I absolutely think that nonbusiness curriculums could use a healthy dose of business lessons," says Brent Lightner '00, a Web entrepreneur who started his design firm, Taoti Enterprises International, at Juniata. "If anything I'd like to see Juniata push harder in this regard. I think students in other POEs could learn a lot from understanding that the more they are able to contribute to the bottom line, the more successful they will be in their own venture or to their employer."
Instituting a series of exercises in the entry-level lab course designed to channel ideas to these two areas, Donaldson also brought in an entrepreneur, Dick Wright, who owns a local RV resort, Heritage Cove Resort. In addition to lecturing, Wright has agreed to let students in the upper-level New Venture Creation course analyze his business plan and write a case study to recommend a long-range strategy. "The idea is to build up a network of entrepreneurs as mentors," Donaldson explains.
Donaldson says the ideal process for student entrepreneurs is to conceive a business idea during the lab sequence, make a funding presentation to the JCEL board while taking New Venture Creation and, if the student receives a $5,000 Seed Capital award, spending the money during the New Venture Startup course. Another student benefit from the Coleman Foundation funds is fully paid travel and lodging for the Collegiate Entrepreneur's Conference. Five students, including Spackman, were selected from a pool of 12 interviewees.
Students also can interact with Juniata faculty who have woven startup-savvy principles into courses beyond the borders of the business department. Marlene Burkhardt, associate professor of business and information technology, has incorporated principles from entrepreneurs into the course Managing Advanced Technologies. She has introduced sections on patent application and intellectual property law and invited Juniata alumna and Trustee, Carol Lake '66, CEO of Verifi Technologies, to talk about intellectual property. "This course was an obvious fit to bringing in entrepreneurial lessons," says Burkhardt, who created her own startup cyber-marketing company, Nittany Research, in 1999. "By using open-source software and low-cost hardware, students can immediately see the incredible opportunities for new businesses."
No matter what you end up doing as a career, you will take skills away from the entrepreneur program that will help you for the rest of your life.
- -Christi Spackman '06
The Advanced Technologies course tackled the Coleman grant initiatives by creating a prototype company that will develop cell phone text messaging and Web accessibility from cell phones. Simultaneously, the class will develop research to gauge the user-friendliness of the software. "It's so exciting that it makes me nervous," says Burkhardt. "We are hoping to carry the business beyond the classroom into other IT courses."
Previous versions of the course focused on developing the technology, but the current incarnation centers on creating the business. Burkhardt points out that the research component may be the most important factor in the course. "We have to make certain the market is ready for our product and willing to embrace it, which is what every entrepreneur should do," she says. "I've taught this course elsewhere, and typically curriculum focuses on managing technologies in large organizations. We are much more focused on where the growth is.
Entrepreneurial enthusiasm also has energized the beginning IT course Principles of Information Technology, which uses four topic "streams" to give students with varied interests an introduction to information technology. Environmental scientist Neil Pelkey has customized the business stream to reflect an entrepreneurial bent. Students can explore entrepreneurial technologies, download video clips of startup success stories (John Dale '54 and others), link to technical news sites and download the Technological and Entrepreneurial Tool Kit.
Founding a dazzling new business does little good if few people know about it, but communications instructor Sarah Worley '00 is out to remedy that situation.
In Message Analysis, a communications course that uses rhetoric, media and popular culture to understand the art of persuasion, Worley has adapted the course content so that students will create a product or service and conceive several communication strategies geared to different audiences. "The students will craft messages for entrepreneurial audiences such as angel investors, fellow entrepreneurs and employees," she explains. "We would like them to create a legitimate business or product to use as a model." Worley eventually would like her best students to collaborate with student-run JCEL businesses to create ads, sales brochures or other message-laden products.
In addition to the restyled curriculum, the Coleman grant will provide funding for more business faculty and faculty from other disciplines to bring entrepreneurial excitement to more courses over the next two years. Funding for student summer internships is available and the College will host a "business boot camp" to share strategies for developing entrepreneurship with business faculty from other colleges and universities at the end of the third year.
"The whole process has been very entrepreneurial," Donaldson says of the College's turn toward new business curriculum. "We've encountered obstacles, made big gains, made some mistakes and we've tried to take advantage of opportunities."