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Entrepreneurship programs have exploded on business school campuses, bringing students a broader understanding of new business startups—and old business revitalization. Spirit N 20 have been developed, implemented, or successfully applied to business by entrepreneurs. In fact, the topic of entrepreneurship has become an great invention, from the printing press to the sili- con chip, has altered the shape of industry and the contours of personal life. Many of these inventions ew business ideas revolutionize the world. Every increasingly popular one at business schools today, for stu- dents who study its fundamentals are well-prepared in all aspects of business: new product development, risk manage- ment, and market assessment. They're also ready to change the world with their new inventions or their new outlooks. "When you look at how a scientific break- through occurs in society, it is always entrepreneurs who have driven that change," says Doug Johnson, director of the New Business Development Enterprise at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. "Old companies and large companies find it extremely difficult to change themselves." "All the major economic growth in this country, and by Sharon Shinn illustrations by Richard Waldrep maybe worldwide, has occurred in small, high-growth com- panies," says Kathryn Simon, director of the Robert H. and Beverly A. Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "Because of the wide- spread presence of entrepreneurial values, large companies have been forced to reevaluate how they work. They've had BizEd MAY/JUNE 2002 to be quicker and more flexible, and they've had to learn to change direction. A company like IBM, which has a tradition of being hierarchical and slow-moving, has made significant changes, partly in response to this entrepreneurial influence." This entrepreneurial spirit isn't just found in inventors and computer geniuses, says Simon. "At the University of Colorado in Boulder, we think entrepreneurship implies a desire for an individual either to start his own business or live within an environment of self-reliance, with low levels of resources in a high-growth business environment. Entrepre - neur ship is really a way of developing thinking in an arena with considerable unpredictability and ambiguity." No matter how it's defined, entrepreneurship as demic programs devoted to entrepreneurship," says Timothy Jones, president of the Louis and Harold Price Foundation and vice president of the Price Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, headquartered in New York City. "What's come on the scene in higher education is the cre- ation of dedicated centers devoted to entrepreneurship within schools of business. It's not just a random class here or there on business plan preparation or venture funding. Now students can take a multitude of classes in these cen- ters and learn all facets of entrepreneurship." a business reality and as a business school staple has skyrocketed in the past two decades. "Over the last ten years, there has been an explosion of aca- ENTREPRENEURIAL