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Entrepreneurial Experience 101 - Ball State University entrepreneurship program - Brief Article

Success - February 1, 2001

Ball State University's maverick director, Donald F. Kuratko, and his challenging programs prepare students for life in the entrepreneurial world.

Focusing on Business Schools

SUCCESS Magazine has decided to go back to school--permanently. And everyone will be smarter for it. Instead of just featuring the best business schools for entrepreneurs once a year, SUCCESS will now continually cover what's happening in the growing field of entrepreneurial education across the nation. SUCCESS will focus on the innovative programs, professors, and students that make up the best schools for entrepreneurs in America. This time around, SUCCESS looks at Donald F. Kuratko and his pioneering program at Ball State University.

He grew up of diminutive stature in the City of Big Shoulders, the son of a Chicago-area funeral director, but through his hard work, passion, and insight, he's led one of the most revered and ground-breaking entrepreneurial college programs in the nation.

Donald F. Kuratko, a 5-foot, 6-inch perpetual motion machine, started the entrepreneurship program at Ball State University in 1983 and has grown it into a Midwestern power that boasts one of the toughest undergraduate entrepreneur programs in academia, an MBA in entrepreneurship, and 90 interactive distance-learning sites that reach across Indiana into Ohio and Kentucky.

"When we started the program, we felt it would be important to the economy to teach students how to run a small business," says Kuratko, whose rapid-fire speaking style, energy, and enthusiasm could convince Fidel Castro to open a haberdashery in South Miami. "I grew up in a family business, so I had an idea of what it was like to eat and sleep entrepreneurship," he says. "I had seen a lot of risks that entrepreneurs take, and I wanted to recreate that feeling for students."

When he was in college, Kuratko thought he would end up joining the family business and working for his father and role model, Donald W. Kuratko, a WWII veteran who started a mortuary company. But after he earned an MBA at Illinois Benedictine College, the school asked him to come back and teach, and during his first year Kuratko's passion was ignited.

After finishing his doctorate, Kuratko crisscrossed the Midwest looking for a university that would allow him to pursue his belief that business schools needed to focus more on teaching entrepreneurship. He proposed this idea to Ball State, which let him start an entrepreneurship program within the business school.

In the last 17 years, Kuratko has built a premier program that is envied and copied by other universities around the globe, and which is perennially ranked by major publications as one of the nation's best. The curriculum, which includes a lot of classroom and real-world experiences, has a key ingredient that makes it distinct among other national programs--risk experience.

"We had the vision to start one of the first entrepreneurship programs in the country, so we made the courses challenging and unique," says Kuratko. "I wanted to make a true laboratory test that means something."

MAKING SPINES SWEAT

What Kuratko designed is a senior-level course called New Venture Creation, or as students have dubbed it, Risk 101. And what it does is turn students into jittery caffeine-chugging zombies who spend their last weeks at college refining a business plan, practicing a pitch, and soaking their sheets with cold sweats at night.

In the course, each individual student develops a business plan and then, four days before graduation, gives a 30-minute presentation in front of professional experts handpicked by Kuratko. A question-and-answer period of about 60 minutes follows, and then the panel of professionals decides whether the plan is feasible. If a student passes, it's on to graduation. If a student fails, it's back to college the next fall for a fifth year.

Kuratko's father inspired the course. "My father told me that unless the students go to bed at night and feel their spines sweat, they would never know what it feels like to be an entrepreneur," he says. "The students really feel the risk. They have something on the line."

Each year, the class attracts about 100 students, but usually only around 35 are left standing in front of the panel at the end. Of that 35, only about 25 will pass and graduate on time.

Kuratko has had his share of criticism for the course. Detractors say that in the real world a person would have a chance to come back in 30 days to present a refined business plan. But the hard-driving professor stands by his program. "If students could come back after 30 days, then they lose the fear factor. I don't want the program to be just another program," he says.

"If students plan properly, they can mitigate the risk and make a mountain into a hill," Kuratko says. "Students take a great deal of pride in the program. It has a great tradition. Those who have gotten through it feel they've been through sort of an entrepreneur boot camp."

Kuratko, 48, who was once the nonconformist, is now the expert who has published several textbooks on entrepreneur education, including Entrepreneurship: A Contemporary Approach, the text that most universities use for their entrepreneur programs. He also is a consultant to other schools attempting to create entrepreneur courses and programs.

"Kuratko? He has more energy than God," says Thomas J. O'Malia, Kinko's Director Chair of the Greif Entrepreneur Center at the University of Southern California. "He is a unique director with a unique program that is quite powerful. How powerful? Seven of the eight top entrepreneur programs are at or near technology centers. Ball State's program is the exception."

"There are about 150 entrepreneur programs out there now with a lot of similarities," Kuratko says. "But I believe we have a distinctive program for the entrepreneurial student. We have created an entrepreneurial experience and environment--and no other school has done that."

Entrepreneurial Thinking on the Cube Farm

Not starting up a dot-com site anytime soon? Decorating your cubical with cat pictures as you take the corporate route for now? Just because you're tucked away in a corner of a corporation does not mean you should stop thinking like an entrepreneur. In fact, thinking outside the cube may get you the chance to run your own department or a spin-off company funded by your employer.

"Having employees thinking like entrepreneurs can lead to the development of new ideas in products and services," says Donald F. Kuratko, who started a corporate entrepreneurship course at Ball State. "Corporations that do not allow for some renegade thinking will soon fall behind their competitors."

The course, which is popular with students and has other colleges calling about replicating it, trains students to keep thinking like entrepreneurs even after being hired by a corporation--where a majority of the students end up. "I want to develop the entrepreneurial perspective in people and see them unleash it and then apply it to their jobs," says Kuratko, who is writing a book on the subject. "That's what corporate entrepreneurship is about."

Now, a number of companies have embraced the idea of entrepreneurial thinking and have changed their corporate culture. In Indiana, 15 to 20 companies pipe in Ball State's corporate entrepreneur course before or after work hours to conference rooms filled with employees.

"Look at how successful 3M has been, or DuPont, or how AT&T developed Lucent Technologies," says Kuratko. "They have a corporate climate that rewards employees for bright ideas. Just having a suggestion box in the back corner of the break room does not cut it anymore. If companies don't provide a climate that is conducive to entrepreneurial thinking, then people will most certainly leave and go out on their own."

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