GEW/USA

The University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (CET) released a report yesterday examining the state of technology entrepreneurship education around the world. The study encompasses the insights of approximately 20 entrepreneurship educators with engineering and technology backgrounds who gathered for the inaugural symposium of the Global Venture Lab, held during Global Entrepreneurship Week in November 2009.

The report, Engineering Entrepreneurship Education: Best Practices and Next Steps, reveals:

• How ecosystems influence educational strategies, 
• Why university systems designed to promote innovation can stifle it, and,
• Why entrepreneurship education is no longer solely focused on fostering as many student-led ventures as possible.

The roundtable included leading educators from Stanford University; the University of Michigan; the University of Texas, Austin; King Saud University; the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur; Tsinghua University; Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH); and the University of Cambridge, among others.

For each of the past two years, the UC Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology has also hosted the A. Richard Newton Global Technology Leaders Conference during Global Entrepreneurship Week. Since its establishment in 2005, the CET’s mission has been to equip engineers and scientists with the skills to lead, innovate, and commercialize technology in the global economy. Stay tuned for information on CET’s plans for GEW this November.

David Heineimeier Hansson, a young entrepreneur from Denmark behind Ruby on Rails and 37signals, suggests that the most important thing an entrepreneur can do is “make a dent in the universe” with their company. 

Hansson is known for creating Ruby on Rails — a “basic development environment” for web programmers—and is a partner at 37signals based in Chicago. At 37signals, he has helped develop Basecamp (which GEW uses for its Host-only intranet), Highrise (which GEW uses for contact management), Campfire, Backpack and other Web-based applications that facilitate project management and information-sharing. 

In an hour-long presentation available through Stanford University’s e-Corner, Hanson also shares the following pieces of advice:

• Start small
• Avoid 80-hour weeks
• Don’t take venture capital money
• Out-teach your competition

Hansson received his bachelor’s degree from the Copenhagen Business School in 2005. In that same year, he moved to Chicago and received Hacker of the Year honors for his work on Ruby on Rails from Google and O’Reilly Media. He runs a blog called LoudThinking.com.

Another story in the media about our friends at Startup Weekend and their recent event bringing Israelis and Palestinians together to create businesses. 

This one showed up on The Street: 

Last weekend, 145 Israelis and Palestinians gathered at the Peres Center for Peace in Jaffa, putting aside political differences for the purpose of entrepreneurial brainstorming.

“Our primary mission is educating entrepreneurs,” says Nager, who’s based in Seattle. “In our experience, money, while necessary in some cases, is not the critical component in the earliest stages. Just taking that first step is really the biggest roadblock.”

Startup Weekend will be running dozens of events during Global Entrepreneurship Week. Stay tuned for a list of cities and countries. 

The Global Cleantech Open Ideas Competition was formally launched today in Silicon Valley as Jonathan Ortmans, president of Global Entrepreneurship Week, joined Rex Northen and Kevin Braithwaite of Cleantech Open for the announcement. 

“A new popularity within the startup culture is attracting inventive minds from around the world to the challenges of meeting our energy needs in a sustainable fashion while enabling them to not just do good, but do well,” stated Ortmans. “The Ideas Competition is a perfect vehicle to engage aspiring entrepreneurs and tap into that passion.”

The Global Cleantech Open Ideas Competition is an official activity of Global Entrepreneurship Week which annually introduces millions of people around the world to entrepreneurship. The competition aims to foster and highlight cleantech “big ideas” from forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and to accelerate the discovery and development of groundbreaking cleantech solutions by working at a grassroots level.

“Our focus is on the intersection between entrepreneurship and cleantech: Entrepreneurship is undoubtedly the engine… [and] Cleantech is the major economic opportunity for the coming decades,” said Northen, executive director of the Cleantech Open.

The Ideas Competition is being run in 19 countries by GEW Hosts: Barbados, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chile, China, Congo, Denmark, France, Ireland, Kenya, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Paraguay, Singapore, Spain, United States and Zambia. 

National winners will represent their country at the Awards Gala in San Francisco, California on November 17 — during Global Entrepreneurship Week. Finalists’ ideas will be presented in a five-minute pitch in front of a crowd of 2,500 investors, entrepreneurs, sponsoring companies, corporations, members of academia, press, and others. The crowd will vote via text message for the “People’s Choice” worth $100,000 in marketing support, legal advising, conferencing services and more to turn the idea into a business. 

CTO ANNOUNCES GRANT

The Cleantech Open also announced a grant from the Kauffman Foundation in support of its efforts.

“We have been working closely with the Kauffman Foundation for two years now, and are delighted to have their support,” said Northen. “The Cleantech Open is the largest organization of our kind anywhere in the world, and our partnership with Kauffman will help us increase both our reach and our impact as we work together to accelerate cleantech entrepreneurship.”

The grant supports an expansion of the Cleantech Open, an organization that provides education, business planning and mentoring of early-stage cleantech entrepreneurs.

“This emerging industry is essential to creating new jobs and boosting the economy,” said Lesa Mitchell, vice president of Advancing Innovation at the Kauffman Foundation. “The Cleantech Open has established itself as a leader in supporting clean-technology startup entrepreneurs who are addressing challenges to starting companies in this industry.”

World leaders have focused on peace in the Middle East for decades and efforts to engage populations directly through entertainment and the arts — like music, dance, poetry and painting — have also aimed to bridge the gap between cultures. 

Now, Startup Weekend is banking on entrepreneurship — bringing aspiring entrepreneurs from Israel and Palestine together in Tel Aviv for a 54-hour event designed to plan and develop startups. 

The event was recently highlighted in a Women Entrepreneur article, “Peace Through Entrepreneurship”:

Startup Weekend Tel Aviv began on Wednesday and finished up Friday. During that time, 130 Israelis and 30 Palestinians worked together, aiming to create viable new businesses. Fifty-six ideas were pitched Wednesday, with 16 selected for teams. “Once you enter into the Startup Weekend event, there is no Israeli, Palestinian, or American—there are entrepreneurs, developers, investors, designers working together to build technology and have fun,” Harel says.

It isn’t easy getting Palestinians and Israelis together, according to Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen and Franck Nouyrigat, directors of the nonprofit Startup Weekend. The organization had to get government approval, hire a bus and lease the Peres Peace House in Jaffa, Israel. 

Some of the 16 ideas selected as teams formed around potential startups included: 

• Azma – Mobile text based system to monitor traffic using crowdsourcing.
• Doctor Web – The new village doctor.  International online medical services. Local nurses record medical treatment for on-duty doctors to diagnose remotely.
• Movieoke – Karaoke killer. Act with subtitles on the screen.
• Open Letter – Send letters to public and government authorities directly and share the letters and replies openly to create public pressure & improved services.
• Virgin Bid – Web based app that plugs into airplane sites and allows a user to bid on who they want to sit next to.
• World Tour Guide – Mobile app for GPS assisted audio tourguides. Crowdsource voice recordings of tours.

During last year’s Global Entrepreneurship Week, ten Startup Weekend events pushed participants from idea to launch in 54 hours. Dozens of ventures were developed in nine US cities and London. This year, the team is planning more than 20 events around the world. Stay tuned for a list of cities and countries hosting Startup Weekend events during Global Entrepreneurship Week in November 2010.

DECA, a worldwide organization that prepares emerging leaders and entrepreneurs, won the Global Entrepreneurship Week/USA Compass Award at the Global Entrepreneurship Week/USA Partners Forum held June 8-9, 2010, at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri.

The Compass Award is given to the organization that best integrates the compass into their activities, outreach and local campaign.

During GEW 2009, DECA incorporated the compass in many of its DECA-sponsored activities. Most notably, the compass appeared 20 times in the November/December 2009 issue of DECA Dimensions (see image on right) that celebrated Global Entrepreneurship Week 2009. The compass was prominently displayed during two Speednetwork the Globe sessions at DECA’s New York Experience Conference during Global Entrepreneurship Week. Banners, copies of DECA Dimensions and lapel pins captured the entrepreneurial spirit.

The compass connects millions of people around the world to a movement of entrepreneurial champions and advocates. The compass represents the intersections of ideas, cultures, information, people and places. The array of vibrant colors that radiate out through the circular band gives a sense of diversity, variety and optimism. It represents a navigator providing direction and guidance.

How do you use the compass in your materials?

Congratulations to another dedicated GEW/USA partner organization, the Johnson County Library in Kansas. 

GovFest for Entrepreneurs, celebrated each year during Global Entrepreneurship Week, has been recognized with a 2010 Top Innovations Award from the Urban Libraries Council headquartered in Chicago. The ULC has worked since 1971 to strengthen public libraries in urban areas and is now focused on transformative programs that benefit the public, including “the unemployed and entrepreneurs” as well as “teens building their work skills.”

GovFest was the top entry in the Economic and Workforce Development category. In 2009, it engaged 456 participants with 50 exhibitors, plus classes offered throughout the day. In its award citation, ULC officials said:

The Johnson County Library’s annual GovFest for Entrepreneurs provides one-stop shopping to connect small businesses with government and non-profit resources. The day-long event includes classes and an exhibit where participants can learn business strategy and become familiar with community services to help sustain and grow their businesses. The combined education and one-stop connections to sources of funding and program support help individual businesses thrive and grow, which contributes to the region’s long-term economic health.

Johnson County Library partners with the Small Business Development Center at Johnson County Community College and KCSourceLink, a small business services organization, to organize the event with guidance from Government Documents Librarian Martha Childers. 

The next GovFest is set for Thursday, November 18, 2010, at the Central Resource Library.

Congratulations to the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) for recently being recognized by the Association for Educational Publishers as having the best math curriculum for high school students. The Distinguished Achievement Award is given to handful of curricula each year that exemplify the strict academic standards of the AEP.  

Entrepreneurship: Owning Your Future, is the 11th edition of the curriculum from NFTE — an organization that contributed to the success of Global Entrepreneurship Week from the very beginning. In fact, it was active during Entrepreneurship Week USA, a 2007 precursor to the global movement. 

• View a sample chapter (pdf)
• View the front matter (pdf)

“NFTE’s mission has always been to correlate fundamental skills taught in school, like math, with business skills, so students can see and apply the real life value of what they’re learning,” said Steve Mariotti, founder of NFTE.

According to a recent press release about the award: 

The NFTE curriculum focuses on critical basic business skills that reinforce the fundamentals of mathematics, including how to calculate the economics of one unit, return on investment, the creation of income statements and balance sheets, and how to manage cash flow. These concepts are rounded out with essential business concepts such as opportunity recognition, creating a marketing plan, negotiation, time management and goal setting.

Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) provides entrepreneurship education programs to young people from low-income communities. It currently operates programs in 21 states and 12 countries and has over 1,500 active Certified Entrepreneurship Teachers.