Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/201447
Students work in the Fordham Foundry, the new incubator at Fordham University. Building Excitement Embracing an interdisciplinary purpose brings a sense of excitement to a business school and its entrepreneurial center, says Bruce Bachenheimer, who directs the Entrepreneurship Lab (eLab) at Pace University's Lubin School of Business. Opened in February 2012 in a building near New York City Hall, eLab's purpose is not only to augment the school's entrepreneurship curriculum with events and services, but also to bring together the schools of business, arts and sciences, health professions, education, and computer science and information systems in crossdisciplinary problem solving. "I recently met with education students who want to develop new educational technologies to teach STEM subjects to New York City high school students—they call themselves 'edupreneurs,'" says Bachenheimer. "We're working with nursing students to help them collaborate with computer science students to develop mobile apps for the field of gerontology. Bringing together students from different colleges has been exciting." The Center for Entrepreneurship at Fordham University's Gabelli School of Business opened earlier this year in partnership with New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Fordham's center includes the 2,500-square-foot Fordham Foundry, the school's new incubator created in collaboration with the city's Department of Small Business Services. The Foundry shares space with New York City Business Solutions, a nonprofit that provides resources, funding, and training to small business owners. The school admitted four entrepreneurs to the incubator earlier 26 November/December 2013 BizEd this year with plans to bring in three more this fall. Although the center's purpose is to serve the Fordham community, it also will perform outreach to the surrounding Bronx community, says center co-director Christine JanssenSelvadurai. In January, the school will offer workshops and boot camps to local business owners and those who'd like to start businesses. Eventually, the school might open its incubator doors to Bronxbased entrepreneurs. Over the next year, JanssenSelvadurai wants to increase the incubator's capacity from 24 to 50 people, grow the center's cadre of mentor volunteers, and add events to its calendar. "Our mission is to spark the idea that there are career paths other than corporate," she says. "Our message is, 'You can't find a job? Then go out and create one for yourself. Then create one for somebody else.' That's how we'll refuel this economy." From Success to Significance With entrepreneurship in the spotlight on many campuses, entrepreneurship centers—and the business schools that support them—are moving to the forefront of campus activities. They're doing so not just through courses and extracurricular programs, but also through research. "A big part of our institute's mission is to fund more research in the areas of entrepreneurship and innovation," says Skinner of the London Business School. "We want everything we do to be based on rigorous methods rather than received wisdom and war stories." That combination of academic rigor and entrepreneurial activity has helped the Johnson Center "cross the chasm" between business and other disciplines on the IU campus as well, says Kuratko. Deans and faculty from other disciplines who might once have seen business schools as symbols of greed now see them as partners in the search for solutions to their own challenges. "We've translated the idea of 'success' to one of 'significance,'" he says. "When I say that to business students, they tell me it changes their whole view of what they want to do in business. We're now talking about making a difference in the world, and we're using entrepreneurship as the vehicle to do that." That shift gives business schools a much wider-reaching role than ever before, he adds. "Business is the one discipline that can reach across every college and school on a campus and have true impact. We're a discipline of significance."