Enterpreneurships
For many years, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is known as one of the best universities in the U.S. This year (2013), the Computer Science and Software Engineering programs are ranked # 3 among the top 100 schools by U.S News and World Report. Recently, CMU is also considered as the best school for entrepreneurship too. When President Barack Obama visited CMU last June, he specifically mentioned CMU’s record of success in entrepreneurship. He said: “No one would have imagined that a school for the sons and daughters of steelworkers would become one of the top global universities with 18 Nobel Prizes winners and 10 Turin Awards (A similar to Nobel Prizes for computer science). Innovations led by professors and students have created more than 300 successful companies and over 9,000 new jobs created over the past 15 years. CMU has become the gold standard for entrepreneurship in American universities.”
Last year, when HarvardUniversity announced the creation of its own entrepreneurial center, it noted that it was playing catch-up to three other universities that already had many years ahead. The Harvard director said: “We are chasing after MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, the three pioneers of entrepreneurship in America.” He noted that Harvard would have to learn from those schools and it was the first time, the top school in the world admitted that they need to learn from others. Few months after that, when the Association of Technology Managers gathered to rate how effective universities were at creating start-up companies, CMU topped the list of all American universities.
Today across America, “Entrepreneurship” is the new trends in universities and many are using CMU’s “active learning” and “experiential method” that focuses on develops real skills. As President Obama noted, the success of entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon is found in its origins. The first generations of Carnegie Mellon students were mostly the sons and daughters of steelworkers from factories around Pittsburgh who preferred to learn “practical skills” for problem-solving rather abstract academic theories. At CMU collaboration across departments to solve real problems was encouraged and this attracted students who were interested at approaching problems from different views. The Wall Street Journal noted that even in the early days of the industrial age, CMU had always produced a different kind of graduates who operated at the intersection of technology and business. The author wrote: “The traditional industry theory dictates that the workers work in factories, and managers work in offices. The managers make all decisions, and the workers just do the works. But at CMU, it is difference, as workers are trained to learn what is happening in the business offices, and managers are trained to go into factories to see how things are done.” It is this “interdisciplinary collaboration” was unique at that time that leads to many innovations in the steel industry and that is why CMU’s approach to problem solving is well known and being taught all over the world.
If you ask any CMU graduates, they will tell you that the advantage of a CMU education is that they are not just taught about existing technology but also future technology and its impacts. Today while graduates from other schools are confused during the transition from an 20th century industrial economy to an 21st century informational economy, CMU graduates had already been trained on this subject and ready to leverage emergent technologies to solve current problems. Over the years, this pragmatic problem-solving approach had evolved into an entrepreneurial mindset. For more than 100 years history, CMU has been a birthplace of innovation. From laboratories and classrooms in school, these ideas have grown to shape the world that we are living today. In 1955, Professor Herbert Simon (Nobel prizes 1978) and Allan Newell invented “Artificial Intelligence” and developed the first computer that could think. It eventually became the foundation of machine learning algorithms for Big Data that most companies are using today to solve complex problems. In 1970, Professor Jack Thorne created the first entrepreneurship course to be taught in the U.S. It eventually became the DonaldJonesCenter for entrepreneurship to train students to become entrepreneurs. In 1977, James Gosling a PhD student created a new programming language called “Java” that become one of the most popular language today. In 1974, Professors Raj Reddy and Angel Jordan created the Robotics institutes and develop the first modern robotics training program in the world, which over the past several years have created many well known robots, including the Mars Rovers and self-driven cars. In 1987, Watts Humphrey developed the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to improve the software process and today the model is being used all over the world as a quality standard. In 1994, Professor Michael Mauldin developed Lycos, the first internet search engine that become the most popular among users until 1999 when Google was created. In 2002, a Ph.D Student named JonathanRothberg developed the first “Gene DNA sequencing” machine that completely revolutionizes the biotechnology industry by reducing the cost of sequencing the genome. In 2004, Professor William Red Whittaker developed the first computer control self-driving car in the world where the car drives itself from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and begins a new trend of self driving car.
CMU has succeeded because it always encourages collaboration between departments regardless of where students come from or what they study. In other universities, entrepreneurship is mostly taught in business department, but at CMU it is taught in every department to encourage the creative energies across the university toward developing start-ups and new technologies. At CMU there are industry mentors who are willing to support students to take an idea from development to fully commercialize. At CMU there is a clear distinction between small business entrepreneurship and technology entrepreneurship, although small business entrepreneurship or small business such as restaurants, small retail stores etc. do very well but they seldom aspire to grow into million dollars business. The technology entrepreneurships is the key focus at CMU where students develop vision and technologies that could change the market resulting in companies that can grow to million or even billion dollars business. That is why the foundation of CMU startups is always based in science and technology which CMU is well known. The industrial revolution of the 20th century was based on product or physical objects such as cars, airplanes, machines etc. but at CMU, students were created a second industrial revolution with products that were not in physical form such as software, scientific formulas, and videogames. They created new companies and new industry such as Amazon, Zappos, and Zynga etc. Because products are non-physical, startups can happen much faster than companies that develop physical products and grow faster because they do not need a lot of money to start and that is why Wall Street analysts called it the new information revolution.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
