This article first appeared in the November 2015 issue of the Venture Atlanta Newsletter.
These days college students aren’t looking for jobs, they’re aiming to create their own. There’s a rising tide of entrepreneurship on campus as ideas get turned into startup ventures. University of Georgia’s students are getting help in striking out on their own through the University’s new entrepreneurship program.
Headed by Bob Pinckney, former CEO of EvoShield LLC, the program is expanding opportunities for students from across campus to gain core skills that enable them to develop and implement new ideas and start their own businesses. To do that the new program is not taking the traditional academic approach.
“I’m not sure you can teach someone to be an entrepreneur, but I think we can teach the fundamental around what it takes to be successful,” says Pinckney. “An entrepreneur works in a landscape filled with a lot of ambiguity and it’s a career where you really have to look for opportunities and solve other people’s problems by coming up with creative ideas.”
Students will be taught to sort through the challenges of creating a business with a program that focused on academics coupled with experiential programs. As ideas become reality, the program will also help them turn into real economic development efforts.
For starters, students throughout the university can enroll in courses leading to a certificate in entrepreneurship. Classes focus on finance and managing startup ventures. The goal is to introduce students to the varied challenges of entrepreneurship.
“No matter what college they’re in, arts and sciences, biology or chemistry they have an interest in entrepreneurship they can get into the certificate program and take classes in the business school that are focused on various aspects of entrepreneurship,” he explains.
At UGA the emphasis is on teaching entrepreneurship from a practical, hands-on perspective.
“The way we teach it is not really from an academic perspective – it’s from a practitioner’s perspective,” says David Sutherland, a member of the faculty and experienced entrepreneur who has worked extensively with a variety of startup companies. “. So I think when we look at successful university entrepreneurship programs whether that’s UT Austin or Colorado Boulder or even Stanford you have practitioners teaching.”
The experts teaching entrepreneurship agree that it is not exactly something that can be taught.
“You can impart a mentality,” says James Flannery, a start-up founder himself who heads FourAthens, a local business catalyst, and is managing director of the Athens Angel Fund. “There are certainly tools that you can give the students that they can apply. You can introduce them to ways of thinking, ways of building, ways of approaching team building that are good nuggets of information.”
In fact, entrepreneurship is a good deal like medicine in the 1800s. If something doesn’t kill the patient, it becomes the new strategy for doing something, according to Flannery.
“Then a lot of people go down that route,” he says. “There are not huge realms of academic data that show if you do A, then B, then C you’ll have a successful outcome. So I think we can give the students the tools on how to think, but I don’t’ think we can fully teach entrepreneurship.”
The program will build upon a variety of other efforts designed to encourage students such as UGA’s Next Top Entrepreneur. This is a campus-wide competition in which students and their business plans square off for prize money and potential capital investments.
The team is building on decades of hands-on business experience to better prepare students for these real world challenges. Pinckney has spent the last two decades as a serial entrepreneur. He built his most recent company from a small venture into a billion dollar corporation before starting his latest career at UGA.
“You can do is give people experiences through case studies, and meeting with other entrepreneurs and hearing about their successes and their failures,” says Pinckney. “This can provide a framework for people to be more successful as they go out and pursue opportunities.”
