A Growing Drumbeat

01 Jun 2011

A Growing Drumbeat

Re: Dan Rumennik (MBA 2012); Jess Muse (MBA 2012); Andrew Rosenthal (MBA 2012); Priv Bradoo (MBA 2008)

Topics: Education-Business Education Education-Business Education News-School News Entrepreneurship-General

Issue Focus: Entrepreneurship

The Business Plan Contest’s popularity is just one indicator of a surge in entrepreneurial activity at HBS, which this year saw the launch of a $50,000 MVP Fund to support students using the “Lean Startup” approach to develop and test a minimum viable product. The fund was the brainchild of Dan Rumennik (HBS ’12), a founding member with fellow first-years Jess Bloomgarden and Andrew Rosenthal of the HBS Start-Up Tribe, an ad hoc group with 150 members who meet weekly to brainstorm ideas, support one another, and pick the brains of local VCs and serial entrepreneurs on the tactical aspects of starting a business.

Tom Eisenmann, the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration, had already noticed the phenomenon of students informally self-organizing into “tribes” around career interests and suggested to Rosenthal (after following his tweets) that he and like-minded students should make it more official. “The Start-Up Tribe has defined themselves as a group of students who really want to launch a business while they’re here,” says Eisenmann. “They’re doing things I’ve never seen before.”

Within days, he continues, the Tribe had a manifesto, “which basically said, ‘Hey, administration, we need mentors, money, and space,’ all requests that the School was mostly on top of already.” The first item was covered by the Entrepreneurs-in-Residence program; the second quickly resulted in the MVP Fund; the last should be resolved in the next academic year, when the Harvard Innovation Lab opens on Western Avenue. (Announced last October, the i-lab will serve as a hub for innovation and collaboration across Harvard and beyond.)

In the classroom, Eisenmann’s new course, Launching Technology Ventures (“How you figure out what to build and how to build it,” he summarizes), is just one entrepreneurship elective that has seen a jump in enrollment. When HBS associate professor Noam Wasserman initially offered Founders’ Dilemmas in 2009, 42 second-year MBAs signed up. Two years later, Wasserman and Senior Lecturer Ginger Graham taught four sections of 68 students each; 170 students were waitlisted. In April, Inc. magazine cited the class as one of its top ten entrepreneurship courses for 2011.

Those feeling left out by the buzz on campus, take heart: Last year saw the launch of the Alumni New Venture Contest, which recognizes the high levels of entrepreneurial activity among HBS graduates and connects alumni with faculty, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and angel investors. This year, Privahini Bradoo won the $25,000 cash prize for BioMine, a novel solution to the millions of tons of e-waste generated each year.

Reflecting on these and other changes, HBS professor Bill Sahlman recalls that there were only 4 faculty members devoted to entrepreneurship when he introduced the elective Entrepreneurial Finance in 1985. “Now we have 35. The Entrepreneurial Manager became part of the MBA Required Curriculum in 2000. We’re responsible for over 20 percent of the classes that students take in their second year. The overall transformation at the School has been dramatic.”