Today, my university played host to what has become one of the
largest non-athletic events on campus: the Cupid’s Cup business model
competition. The event is funded, in part, by alumnus Kevin Plank, the founder
and CEO of Under Armour. The name of the event reflects Plank’s first business
venture, which involved buying roses wholesale and selling them cheaply to
students around Valentine’s Day, undercutting nearby retailers. This
is not the only business model competition on campus. In fact, many of the
competitors seemed to have circulated all of the various opportunities on
campus for securing seed funding and other resources.
Nevertheless, Cupid’s Cup is one of the largest and has
garnered national attention, largely due to its presence in the corporate spotlight. The day started
with a business and innovation showcase, where local and university-based
start-ups can present their products and services to potential investors at
conference-like booths. Attendees voted on their favorite booths, and the
winners were presented with cash prizes of $2,000 each. The main event,
however, was a competition in which six teams of student entrepreneurs from
around the country pitched their ideas to a panel of judges. The teams
essentially have a few minutes to tell their entrepreneurial story, complete with props
and multimedia, in the hopes of winning $50,000 and access to Plank’s expertise
and network.
As an interested onlooker and researcher,
this was an illuminating experience for a number of a reasons. First, there was
clear evidence supporting the idea that entrepreneurship permeates my
university’s institutional culture.
In one short afternoon, I observed the culture’s heroes (e.g., Plank, the epitome
of the enterprising student turned entrepreneur), codes (e.g., “the special
sauce,” referring to intellectual property, or what makes a product or service unique),
and symbols (e.g., the marker board, signifying the constant need for daring
ideas and curiosity). When the Dean of the business school spoke, he proclaimed
that “we live and breathe entrepreneurship every day in the halls of Van
Munching [Hall].” Dr. Wallace Loh, President of the University of Maryland,
made it clear he wants this to be a university-wide occurrence, declaring his
ambitious goal that all 37,000 students to be exposed to innovation and
entrepreneurship education.
Second, I was immediately struck by the resources required
to produce an event of this magnitude. Of
course, much of the money was put up by donors, which included AOL and BB&T
Bank. Still, the event was largely planned and
implemented by university staff in the business school, particularly its two
entrepreneurship-related centers. There are scholars who link the rise of entrepreneurship
in colleges and universities to the search for new money in the face of
declining state and local appropriations. Although at least one of teams
competing was marketing a product whose intellectual property belonged to the
university, I could not help but wonder if more is being spent promoting and
teaching entrepreneurship than is being brought in through licensing royalties.
If this is the case, we need research that looks at the true costs and benefits
of these initiatives. And we cannot think of the entrepreneurial turn in higher
education as purely a rational response to economic conditions. It must serve
other purposes.
Third, I noticed an interesting paradox that has been discussed by a few others. Entrepreneurship, in part, is about taking risks to disrupt
the status quo. For this reason, the university has developed an entire
marketing campaign around the slogan “Fearless Ideas.” But what Cupid’s Cup and
similar initiatives try to do is minimize the risk to students by providing
coaching, access to experts, and seed funding. The university has created a set
of resources that collectively create a business incubator for students. Some of
these resources come directly from state appropriations, hence the concept of
the state-subsidized student entrepreneur developed by Matthew Mars.
Interestingly, the competition included an award for the team that had best
leveraged all of these resources in developing their product or service. Plank
encouraged “all those out there who want to start a venture but don’t know where
to begin” to make use of campus resources to incubate into reality “the
fearless ideas that keep you up at night.” What I find intriguing, however, is
the possibility that all of this coaching and all of these resources actually
constrain innovation. There are norms and parameters set, shaping the
types of ideas that students pursue in order to gain access to seed money. It
could be the most disruptive, novel ideas are those that are never given the
chance to compete or win any money because they do not conform to
institutional expectations of social/economic value creation.
The final learning moment for me was the most profound. It
aligned with a comment one of my advisors made during a talk I gave on entrepreneurship in education. He said that the rise of entrepreneurship is a symptom of
system failure. We saw similar discourses about the need to be innovative and
entrepreneurial in the 1980s, when, much like today, our country grappled with
slow economic growth, questions about global competitiveness, and high
unemployment. In other words, we turn to entrepreneurship when there are few
good jobs, and the powers that be want people to reignite the rugged
individualist spirit and channel ingenuity in order to pave their personal path
to prosperity. At Cupid’s Cup, President Loh told the audience that there is a
lack of formal, full-time jobs for this generation of students. Graduates in
the 21st century need to invent their own jobs, and the nation needs
them to innovate in order to out-compete India and China. After all, in order “to
win the future” students must contend not just with competition from “Baltimore
and Boston, but also Bangalore and Beijing.”
So, it’s not really just about fearless ideas and making
dreams come true. We have to think about the particular historical moment that has given rise to
investment in student entrepreneurialism—how the social context has shaped the field.
The sociology of knowledge teaches that a field emerges not merely from ideas
themselves, but also the settings in which researchers and practitioners work. How
is it that entrepreneurship has developed into a subject of study, something
that is “recognized as worth knowing, teaching, credentialing, advancing
through research, and the like”? (Gumport, 2007, p. 349). When we step back to
do this type of analysis, we recognize the multifaceted dimensions of the push
for entrepreneurial studies—equal parts political, economic, and cultural.
Entrepreneurship comes to embody the concept of functionalization. That
is, when one discourse comes to serve the strategic and utilitarian ends of another: national economic competitiveness.
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Gumport, P. (Ed.). (2007). Sociology of higher education: Contributions and their contexts. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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