Universities try to keep entrepreneurs at home

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By Kristi Essick

(IDG) -- A number of leading engineering and business schools have banded together to create an international association that aims to foster high-tech entrepreneurship.

The U.K.'s Cambridge University, the business school HEC in Paris, Barcelona's Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Montreal's Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales and Ifrane University in Morocco joined France's prestigious engineering school, the Ecole des Mines d'Alès, last week to launch the association.

The Entrepreneurship Education and Training International Association intends to help the creation of high-tech startups in each of the member universities. Other schools would be invited to join, including U.S. universities such as the University of Southern California and Stanford University.

"An engineer is someone who has a project they want to develop," said Francesc Sole Parellada, head of the Innova program for entrepreneurship at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Helping engineers turn these projects into concrete companies should be part of every engineering school's curriculum, he added.

Robert Papin, director of HEC's entrepreneurship program, said, "The question is, will French engineers develop their own technology companies or go to Silicon Valley and let an American company profit from their research?" Too often, he added, European university students develop a promising technology but don't know how to go further with the idea.

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Each of the universities involved in starting the association already has an established entrepreneurial program in place, from coursework and business plan competitions to incubators and spinoff organizations. Together, however, they hope to sponsor international networking events, conferences and student exchanges, as well as develop joint R&D programs. They will also aim to place students in high-tech companies for internships.

In addition, the association plans to invite high-tech companies to join the initiative. These companies could offer training, research facilities and even financing for spinoffs. However, the universities aren't yet sure how such alliances would work. "Companies are wary of these types of alliances, because they want to feel like they are co-owners of the research," Papin said.

The other hurdle the association faces is bad timing. A year ago, business and engineering students were strongly attracted to entrepreneurship classes, but demand has fallen off steeply with the economic downturn. Peter Hiscocks, director of the entrepreneurship center at Cambridge University, said the number of MBA students interested in starting their own companies had fallen from 30 percent last year to only 2 percent this year.

But while MBAs might be deserting entrepreneurship courses in droves, engineering students won't be so easily deterred. In Cambridge's "B3" course, which teaches the fundamentals of building a business, 100 percent of the students are from the engineering department. "There has been no drop-off in the desire of engineers to be entrepreneurs," Hiscocks said.

Cambridge is a good example of how the spirit of entrepreneurship can be cultivated on campus. The university is surrounded by some 1,500 technology companies, many of which are spinoffs from university research labs. But Hiscocks is wary that the new entrepreneurship association may take the wrong approach.

"In Europe, universities are looking for government backing, but throwing public money at it isn't going to help," Hiscocks said of the entrepreneurial programs he has seen in continental Europe. At Cambridge, which has modeled its entrepreneurship programs on those at universities such as MIT and Stanford, the idea has always been to seek investment from the technology industry itself.

But the reason so few students at European research universities and business schools have yet to spin out their own companies may be more cultural than anything else. In France, at least, students who attend such prestigious institutions as the Ecole des Mines d'Alès and HEC are still prone to take a job in a large private company or join the government. "Young people don't yet have the taste for risk," Papin said.