This project, at Ohio State University, offers educational solutions to the serious challenges posed by global competition and the rapid pace of change in IT. Gaps exists between the skills needed by IT industries and those posessed by new hires. Education and experiences of graduates of typical U.S. undergraduate computing programs may be out of sync with national needs. While organizations today face an imperative to innovate in order to drive growth and remain competitive, most graduates lack the entrepreneurial skills to serve as change agents, understanding of such important business concepts as market needs, or a vision of future technology directions. This project, titled NEWPATH, is aimed at addressing these challenges. NEWPATH will produce graduates who have solid command of computing technologies, a vision of technology advancement directions, understanding of the needs of the market, and, perhaps most importantly, real entrepreneurial experiences in the IT world. Graduates will be ready to become key members of entrepreneurial teams in established IT companies or to lead their own IT start-ups.
The NEWPATH plan is designed to produce graduates in computing who will become industry world leaders as a result of having gained significant knowledge, training, and crucial experience in entrepreneurial activities before graduation. A key component of the program is an intense six-month immersion, immediately prior to graduation, in which students in the program form small entrepreneurial teams that attempt to create a model start-up through all phases of the process, including ideation, developing business plans, seeking venture capital, designing and building an IT product/service, marketing, etc. While the experience of creating and successfully running an IT start-up would be extremely valuable in preparing students for their future professional careers in the IT industry, the experience of going through the initial stages of setting up such a start-up, even the experience of creating a start-up that actually fails, can be of almost equal value in preparing students for IT industry leadership.
This project has the potential to serve as a national undergraduate computing education model. Students will pursue technical educational mastery plus they will acquire knowledge and experience sufficient to: -Identify potential business opportunities in the IT industry, either in the form of new products, tools, and services, or innovative applications of existing products, tools, and services; -Evaluate the resources needed, the potential rewards, and the potential risks in pursuing new opportunities; -Perform realistic evaluations of competing products and the potential for success or failure against competitors; -Effectively persuade venture capital firms and other potential partners of the merits of an entrepreneurial vision. -Help organize and work with a multidisciplinary team that takes a potential product or service through market research; attracting venture capital; design and product development; and successfully marketing the product by use of effective, low-cost promotional tools.
These are qualities that meet the needs of employers and also address issues of U. S. global competitiveness.
Entrepreneurship, especially IT entrepreneurship, has been key to the growth of the American economy for a number of years. The primary goal of the NEWPATH program was to help nurture the next generation of IT entrepreneurs. Judging by the results, in terms of the number of startups and other entrepreneurial activities that NEWPATH students have engaged in, the program has been a complete success. When it was initially designed, we had expected the main components of the program to be the entrepreneurship minor, the internships in the startups, and the e-practicum. These are precisely the types of components that other entrepreneurship programs in a number of universities have focused on as well. A key lesson that we learned early on was the importance of creating a close-knit community of students at all levels that enables them to learn from each others’ experiences. This is especially important for entrepreneurship, which is not just an academic topic that can be fully mastered by taking some courses. Students need to discuss and reflect on each others’ experiences and ideas related to enterprises. Doing so helps them to relate their and other students’ experiences to ideas and concepts that may have been abstractly discussed in the entrepreneurship courses and make those ideas solid and relevant. And having a community that includes students at all levels helps both the novice students as well as the more experienced ones. The other important lesson we learned was the importance of helping students to get an early start in creating their network of contacts with successful entrepreneurs, technology gurus, potential partners in future enterprises, and potential venture capitalists. In order to achieve this, students have to be provided adequate opportunities to interact, via various activities such as the Startup Weekend. This does require some minimal financial resources and we were fortunate in having NSF funds that we could use for this purpose. These two important ideas were critical for NEWPATH’s success in achieving its main goal and we strongly recommend other schools considering the creation of an entrepreneurship program account for them in the design of their program. Thus the main outcome of the program is a unique new approach to helping nurture the next generation of IT entrepreneurs who can exploit the affordances of information technology in various domains to solve a multitude of problems while also achieving personal success.
