Chicken and Egg
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal published an interesting article, Facebook Ignites Entrepreneurial Spirit at Harvard. The article discusses the Havard students who have been inspired by Mark Zuckerberg’s runaway success with Facebook and have attempted to mirror his efforts. As you would expect, the article indicates a handful of startups have been working to follow in Facebook’s footsteps, with varying degrees of success. The article also mentions that Harvard has seen spiking interest in various entrepreneurial contests and events on campus. Harvard has even gone as far as to relax its policies around allowing student-run ventures to operate in its dormitories.
Recent days have also seen several interesting blog posts by David Adewumi emerge on the Penn State student-run site ISTBuilding.com. The first generated a lot of discussion regarding how the Penn State community compares to the typical university bastions of startups and entrepreneurship. The post which follows this proceeds to highlight some of the successes this past year has seen.
The blog posts complement the focus of the WSJ article, in that they raise the discussion of what is required to continue growing Penn State’s entrepreneurship community.
David includes a good list of the recent successes:
1. Several Penn State companies have launched within the past few years and are on their way to being successful.
2. In the last year, the formal entrepreneurial community has had a big boost via Lion Launch Pad, Blue Lion Networks, Invention 2 Venture, Ideablob, Ideapitch, and a few news-worthy events for Penn State co-founded teams.
3. In the past few months, the informal entrepreneurial community has had a big boost via blogs like IST Building, Matt Maisel, PSU startups, and get togethers, like the one we had at the Indian Pavilion. With ideas like one Varun has been tossing around about informal TED gatherings to watch and discuss the videos, I’m sure this will only grow in the next months.
4. Next year will kick off with not one, but two, major startup events for the community. (Startup Weekend and Invention2Venture)
Forward progress such as these will only help to continue to provide inspiration for the community. It is also fantastic to see the passion evident in the discussion generated as a result of David’s posts. Moving forward, it will be important to focus that passion on finding additional ways to build out the community, like assisting in building ventures from fledgling innovative concepts, connecting ventures and aspiring entrepreneurs, organizing informal meetups, and attracting more events for the community to rally around.
Make no mistake - the past year has seen a strengthening culture shift with Penn State growing more entrepreneurial. It will be a slow process moving forward even so. More can always be done, though, so harness the energy shown in the blog comments and channel it into finding new ways to grow the community!
