I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the Boston entrepreneurial scene and creative economy since commenting on Chase’s blog post in which he discussed the need for “weak ties” in Boston. In a nutshell, I was sharing my experience of getting a degree at Babson College (I’ve also written about how Babson’s curriculum and community work to “breed” entrepreneurs), but not having any idea what was going on at MIT or Harvard or BU or Northeastern for entrepreneurship and startups. I’ve heard the same from students and alumni at these schools about Babson and Olin College of Engineering, which sits right next to Babson. Students want to connect more, and recognize the power in diversity of minds.
Each greater Boston area school fosters dense pockets of innovation, top-notch professors, interesting speakers, and unique curriculums, programs and opportunities. Seeing and reaping the benefits first-hand of the support, positivity, collaboration and idea sharing happening at a lot of the Boston startup scene as well as from working in an incubator space, I can’t get away from the benefits these campuses and the greater Boston creative economy could reap from more cross-campus collaboration.
On the one hand, I understand why college administrators might not want to do this: ultimately they’re competing for talent and revenue. Their focus is on getting the best professors to their schools, the best speakers, designing the best programs and curriculums and more to lure in the best students and teach them well so they will hopefully be successful out of school and give back to the college as alumni. However, that doesn’t mean collaboration can’t bring greater value to each individual school and students as a whole.
For example, Babson doesn’t focus on engineering/programming like MIT, but we certainly have a deep understanding of markets and are well-schooled in evaluating opportunity and developing strategies to execute on ideas. Imagine what the two could do together, even simply in informal networking events. It’s the whole collective intelligence idea that I seem to be obsessing about right now. And there’s lots of other theories to back up the importance of differences in mindsets and schools of thought in fueling innovation, like open and cumulative innovation theories that have been substantiated by neuroscientist research (a good read on this is Iconoclast). Here are a couple ideas that I think could help foster more of this, and ultimately lead to more successful startups in Boston:
Student-run startups get a cross-campus pass
The first would be a simple program that allows student startups at various schools to visit events and get hands-on advice from classes at other regional Boston schools.
The events are pretty straightforward and I can’t imagine are hard to operationalize. Lots of panels and speaking events at colleges cost money to attend. Let’s face it: college students bootstrapping a startup just don’t have the money for these. However, these students are more often than not the people that can add the freshest perspective to these discussions and reap the most benefits from applying learnings to their immediate situation.
As for cross-campus classroom collaboration, I can’t think of a better win-win: startups from school A get advice from classroom at school B; students from school B apply learnings and critical thinking in a real-life case study. So perhaps a Bentley non-tech startup needs advice from a entrepreneurial programming class at MIT or creative social media class at Emerson: new ideas, un-thought opportunities or applications surface, solutions to a current challenges are offered, etc. Conversely, maybe a killer invention from an MIT student startup is struggling to identify their market potential and could reap the help from students at an entrepreneurship class at Babson. It’s benefiting the students in the classroom (think and apply knowledge to a real-life idea/startup) as well as these 2-3 person student startups that need help at their critical early stage, and who will eventually graduate and give back to the colleges later in life.
Cross-institutional incubator for early-stage recent alumni startups
This would be an incubator house in the city for most promising entrepreneurs from a variety of schools. You can imagine top-notch seniors or recent alums from these schools (pairs, trios, etc.) apply and if accepted are housed for a certain amount of time. They’re mentored by faculty at these different schools and the various startups assist one another in their critical early-stages (this happens naturally in an incubator, anyways). This would give these students a higher probability of success and a great support and learning network.
I think this would add the most value to colleges outside of Boston (Babson, Olin, WPI), where their location gives them an inherent disadvantage in terms of networking in and collaborating with the entrepreneurial scene downtown and in Cambridge, and students at other schools. These students could offer and reap a lot in this scene.
I’d love to hear what current student startupers or aspiring startupers think about this idea. And what about college administrators?
Tags: Babson, Boston, entrepreneurship, Startups