The mission of university is changing, spurred by students’ desire for alternative opportunities and shifting public expectations. A growing emphasis is now placed on ‘impact’ and how their undergraduates and researchers translate their knowledge into real-world applications, products and services.
This recently published survey, conducted by the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey, confirms this trend. We’re seeing more and more students across the globe consider an entrepreneurial career path. The survey indicates that 7% plan to start their own business immediately after finishing their studies, whereas 31% plan to do so within five years of graduating.
If such a large majority of undergraduates have entrepreneurial ambitions, one can argue that this is a vastly underfunded student activity at most universities across the world, and especially at leading regional universities like the University of Sydney and across Australia. This was confirmed by a recent visit I did to the top universities in the UK to analyse their student entrepreneurship initiatives.
From a strategic perspective, a key insight that must be acknowledged by universities is that much of a country’s economic growth from innovation will come from their university graduates (and drop-outs), and not from their traditionally coveted research commercialisation pipeline.
Put simply, the vast majority of the economic wealth in the future will be created by your graduates building valuable companies, not from your researchers so why is much commercialisation effort spent on optimising for IP protection and so little spent on funding entrepreneurs, especially those building scalable technology companies?
Since running a university startup accelerator for last three years, I visited many top universities around the world and only a few are truly investing in student entrepreneurship activities.
What is clear is the tide is turning, and the top global universities recognise this trend and have started to make investments at various levels. At a glance many Australian universities like Sydney University, with a comparable student and researcher size, income and ambition are vastly underfunding their ‘impact initiatives’.
The tide is turning:
- Oxford University recently announced a $447m USD partner venture capital fund for science and technology startups — probably the largest university venture fund in history
- Saïd Business School at Oxford, under its new Dean from Harvard, has revamped and increased funding to its Entrepreneurship Centre to now include the‘LaunchPad’ co-working space and new programs
- University of California has announced plans for a $250m USD fund to invest in student and staff startup ventures
- Stanford recently gifted over $3m to StartX, their student founded accelerator program which will help commercialise startups from Engineering, Business and Medical faculties
- University College London student enterprise and small business group, UCL Advances, has now three co-working space partnerships across London and is expanding its student entrepreneurship programs, including undergraduate courses, extra-curricular workshops, advisory and business loans.
- Melbourne University’s startup accelerator, MAP, is expanding their program initiatives with more staff and faculties contributing funding and created a brand new co-working space for their student founders
I believe that the best academic research is conducted by the most entrepreneurial researchers. I believe the best graduates are those that combine their ambition with an entrepreneurial mindset to build valuable services and businesses. The mission of university is changing and creating ‘startup infrastructure’ to support the very best of both is the only winning strategy for the university of the future.
In part two of this series I’m going to explore emerging startup-support trends within higher ed.
