Interaction
Graduate students mix it up
Fall 2006
A few of the 70 students who participated in the Stanford Graduate School of Business Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship. Most were from medicine and engineering. Next summer, they will be joined with students of law, education and the humanities.
By Meredith Alexander Kunz
For Rong Xu, the Stanford Graduate School of Business Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship was the answer to four years of searching. The biomedical informatics graduate student at the School of Medicine had made a point of taking business classes before—a seminar here and there—but she still aspired to learn more about how business really works. When she heard about the new entrepreneurship program, she jumped at the chance to spend four weeks of her summer in the classroom.
"It changed my view of the business world, of what being a successful entrepreneur looks like," Xu said.
Xu was one of 70 graduate students who spent parts of June and July taking intensive courses in business disciplines and designing new ventures together in the first Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship (SIE). The institute was inspired by the 2005 recommendations of the Commission on Graduate Education, part of the university-wide effort to foster interdisciplinary research and education. The commission's report called for more opportunities for graduate students in any field to learn about other disciplines.
Business and management are among the areas of greatest appeal to many science and engineering graduate students, and SIE was designed and launched by the Graduate School of Business faculty and staff in less than a year. The program's academic director is Garth Saloner, the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Electronic Commerce, Strategic Management and Economics and the director of the Business School's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.
Though the new program was open to non-Stanford applicants, in its first year all but three participants were from Stanford. Thirty-five were PhD students, nine were medical students and 23 were master's or recently graduated master's students. They hailed from engineering, life sciences, earth sciences and social sciences.
"Students in those parts of the university either go on to take non-academic jobs—going into industry—or they go into academia. But within academia, they advise and mentor students who themselves go off and start businesses and go into young ventures," Saloner said. "The idea was to give people like that an introduction to business and management so that we could help them jump-start the process that otherwise takes place in on-the-job training."
Students came away satisfied: On a 5-point scale, they rated the program a 4.6. For the next session, set to begin June 18, 2007, Saloner said program leaders plan to recruit students from law, education and the humanities.
How much can students learn in a month? Classes met daily, with three or four one-hour sessions, and, according to Saloner, students caught on fast to a wide range of business disciplines and skills.
"The first two-thirds of the program is really a kind of mini-MBA," he said. It covered topics such as finance, marketing, accounting and business strategy. During the last portion of the month, students learned how to start a new business and develop it. Along the way, they also learned skills such as public speaking, leadership and networking—which for some are just as important as discerning data points on a spreadsheet.
"I learned lot of social skills, like networking, which is exactly what I want and need," Xu said.
Figuring that networking was high on everyone's list of priorities, SIE staff made sure that students were divided into interdisciplinary study groups, and organizers also rearranged student seating weekly so participants could maximize the number of contacts they made.
For some, those contacts may be the most lasting benefit. Katherine Murray, a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Communication, knew only two of the students going into the program. "It was this vast group of PhD students, people I'd never had the opportunity to cross paths with before," she said. "Now I have an extended network of people I can bounce ideas off of."
The program also gave students the chance to see entrepreneurs at work. Participants visited six new ventures, where they were greeted by CEOs who revealed the companies' inner workings. Students got an insider's view of a full range of startups—including one that had been sold shortly before they arrived. Employees were busily packing but still stopped to offer encouragement. Indeed, one key lesson, Saloner pointed out, is that while starting a business is risky, it is not career-ending if the company does not take off or is sold.
In the final portion of the program, students presented their ideas for new ventures to an audience of alumni, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. "One of the great things about this university is the extraordinary range of technologies that are being developed in the labs," Saloner said. Many of the students' business plans were based on ideas from their lab research; some seemed readily marketable, he said. Of the 14 concepts presented, "there were easily four or five new ventures that could be successful."
Xu's project was a health search engine. She came away with some surprises. "Before, I thought, I'm going to build the coolest thing in the world and people will come to me—but it's totally different," she said. "It's not about your technology—you could have the coolest thing, but you need to reach people through marketing. You need to get your product out, to get people to use it."
David Klaus, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at the School of Engineering, came away with a similar lesson. Klaus hopes to develop affordable tools for developing countries. He has created an irrigation pump that uses minimal amounts of metal, instead employing materials indigenous to Burma, such as bamboo, to keep costs low. He knew he needed business knowledge to back up his design expertise.
"I realized, in the travels I've done in developing countries, that it's not enough just to have a good product, to make a product that works well. You have to have the business skills to get it out to people, to market it, to develop a supply chain. If you don't have that, your product just sits in your garage," he said.
For Klaus, SIE was "a very eye-opening experience." At times, confronting the realities of starting a business was "sort of scary and uncomfortable," he said. "But I need to understand these things and how to leverage them if I'm really going to do something that's going to be productive and beneficial to other people." He has since traveled to Burma and launched two of his product ideas—including the water pump—into full-scale production.
The program fueled many students' motivation to form their own companies, and many said the training will serve them well in any leadership position. "There is a great need for people in leadership to have a basic understanding of business skills—how to read a budget sheet or do long-term projections," Murray said. "I went in to learn a certain set of skills, and I absolutely feel that I got that. It was a perfect, really intense month of introductory work in accounting, finance and entrepreneurship."
Meredith Alexander Kunz is a freelance writer.