Recent Research: Student involvement overlooked in university entrepreneurship efforts

While conventional wisdom suggests that university entrepreneurship efforts should focus on faculty spinoffs or student inventions, recent research highlights the importance of student talent in entrepreneurial ecosystems. In an effort to create employment opportunities in the startup space, several universities throughout the country are implementing programs that embed students into their local startup communities.  

In Revisiting the Roles of the University in Regional Economic Development: A Triangulation of Data, authors Yas Motoyama and Heike Mayer argue that the teaching function of a university is overlooked in discussions on economic development. First, the authors use a regression model and find that the educational achievement of the general population was statistically significant in explaining differences in startup rates and the ratio of high-growth firms. They do not find evidence that the numbers of research-intensive universities and research expenditures are statistically significant. The authors supplement these conclusions by surveying and interviewing firms in three regions (Boise, Kansas City, and Portland) on how they interact with universities. In both instances, they ascertain that high-growth firms in the IT, life sciences, and business service sectors mainly interact with colleges and universities when it comes to hiring skilled graduates.

The Role of Research Universities in U.S. College-Town Entrepreneurial Ecosystems also sheds light on the roles that anchor universities play in economic development and startup communities. In this unpublished analysis of 53 mid-sized, regions identified as “college towns,” the study’s authors – the University of Iowa’s Haifeng Qian and Colorado’s Xin Yao – do not find evidence that the presence of university entrepreneurship programs (e.g., degrees or certificates, incubators, research parks, or Small Business Development Centers) significantly improves startup rates. Instead, they discover a significant association between the share of college degree holders and entrepreneurship in college-town metros.

This result, in addition to their case-study analyses of the Boulder and Iowa City regions, prompts the authors to recommend that universities focus on cultivating talent pipelines to support entrepreneurial ecosystems. “The anchor university can better meet the local labor market demand (including from startups) than universities from other regions, as college students have many opportunities to build connections with local businesses through internships or networking opportunities,” they write.  

Author Julian Wyllie draws a similar conclusion in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education on university innovation centers and their role in supporting entrepreneurship. Citing published research from Ohio State professor Matthew Mayhew and his research partner Benjamin Selznick, Wyllie suggests, “that if an institution focuses too closely on the number of start-ups or patents that are established by a center, the college might miss the impact of what an innovation center can do for students who don’t want to be business owners immediately after college.” Mayhew and Selznick find that the interdisciplinary nature of the centers – the ability to attract students and faculty from all backgrounds and majors – helps contribute to their value. Furthermore, an additional benefit to innovation centers is their ability to develop connections with local businesses, Wyllie notes.

Throughout the country, many universities are offering programs to embed students in their respective entrepreneurial ecosystems. Notable examples include:

• Startups2Students, a project of HackCU and CU Boulder's Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative, seeks to “flip the traditional career fair on its head” by holding networking events that connect 20 of the region’s startups with 150 CU students. The program then helps make connections for internships and employment.
• Students+Startups, a similar program from Trinity University, the co-working space Geekdom, and the 80|20 Foundation, which works to connect students to paid internships with San Antonio-based startups. Rackspace chair and co-founder Graham Weston is the founder of both Geekdom and the 80|20 Foundation, as well as an alum of the university.
• The Entrepreneurship at Cornell initiative facilitates multiple internship programs for students at startups. The Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) provides matching grants for biotechnology companies based in New York that wish to employ student interns. The NSF-supported Cornell Center for Materials Research provides matching funds for internships at small manufacturing and other R&D-intensive small companies in the state. 
• In Chicago, a program from DePaul’s Coleman Entrepreneurship Center places 10 students each year at Chicago-area startups.

Ultimately, making connections between students and local startups presents a strong opportunity for universities to engage in entrepreneurial ecosystems beyond the traditional technology transfer and commercialization frameworks. In 2014, SSTI looked at the university role in technology-based economic development and the emerging trend of university initiatives that seek to retain student entrepreneurs. However, as the above research shows, more attention should be paid to how universities affect entrepreneurial ecosystems by generating the talent desired by startups.