Are You Listening SMU?
So after firing off an introduction, I got to speak a couple of days ago with Ms. Heather Alden from the University of Texas down in Austin about the university's new business plan competition for aspiring social entrepreneurs called the Social Innovation Competition. It seems some rumblings of social entrepreneurship are suddenly being heard out of UT Austin now, though the university has no formal curriculum in the field. The new business plan competition, open to both undergraduate and graduate students in the entire state-wide UT system, as well as Texas A&M and Rice Universities…is offering a nifty $50,000 prize to the winner. That’s a lot of text books, tuition and pizzas mom and dad would probably be thrilled not to have to pay for. Heather said the competition will expand to students from all other universities in 2008. Color me intrigued. Two years ago when SBIG launched our operations here in Dallas, we established as one of the prime objectives in our five year strategic plan for building the social enterprise business sector here, the construction of an academic platform in Dallas for social entrepreneurship at the university level. Identifying the Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business as our primary target for multiple reasons…academics, entrenched business contacts in the Dallas community, an outstanding donor base, proximity to potential neighborhood projects, etc…we decided to target Dallas’ most prestigious university as the object of our social venture desires straight out of the box. Two years later…we are still pointed with determination towards achieving that goal at SMU, and we think our project at Townview Magnet Center represents a great first step in seeing this accomplished. Developing a high-impact high school curriculum in social venture entrepreneurship to attract the attention of the top business school in Dallas just makes sense in my opinion if you want the Forbes ranked program to sit up and take notice. You might even think of it as a precursor to seeing what we ultimately desire here in Dallas…an MBA program for social enterprise business. I say you might…because I do. I just think it will be very tough to ignore several hundred bright and ambitious young people 20 minutes from the SMU campus who are annually emerging from one of the nation’s most acclaimed high schools seeking business degrees. With the development of this program, those same students will now be studying social entrepreneurship as part of the first program of its kind in the nation. It should be even more difficult in light of the fact that the Townview students also tend to attract attention from places outside Texas…top shelf institutions like Harvard, Duke, Stanford, MIT and Wharton…in other words the crème-de-la-crème of US business schools...and based on the conversations I’ve had with a few of them, they seem to be very interested in the chance to maximize their future potential at these schools. Coincidently, each of the schools I just listed…and a number of others with similar pedigree…just happen to offer degree programs in social entrepreneurship. I think Texas universities would be well advised to sit up and take notice of the Townview program. Syracuse President Dr. Nancy Cantor must have agreed, since she shamelessly took advantage of her opportunity to speak at Townview in the September symposium SBIG sponsored to boldly tout her top-ranked school of business entrepreneurship to the Townview kids as a viable option in direct competition with the Texas universities. Good for her. That sound you’re hearing is the raucous applause reverberating through my laptop. Texas needs a good swift kick in the pants here…and I do mean a GOOD ONE...something administered with serious mustard on it. It’s absurd that the nation’s second largest state and one of our most strategically placed economies, has no university program in this field…none. With the 2nd largest population of female owned businesses in the nation, and a gathering tsunami of female entrepreneurs and senior level executives now interested in benefiting society with their business and professional lives, that’s a colossal deficit. If somebody comes along who recognizes that this force can be energized for both financial and social empowerment…well you can use your imagination, but the prospects are dizzying. Maybe you can get a glimpse of why I get jazzed when I realize that we are opening virgin territory here for social entrepreneurs. Back in late 2004 one night after I’d somehow managed to wrangle an invitation to the prestigious SMU Tate Lecture Series out of the president of a campus business club, (it’s normally reserved for MBA students, professors and a select few alumni business hotshots in the DFW area), I broached the question of social entrepreneurship to a few SMU professors…including a department head…with predictably disappointing results. To put it delicately…the concept simply hasn’t caught on there yet. You’ll note I said “yet”. The UT-Austin effort is a significant step forward, and based on the popularity and success of some other social venture business plan competitions such as the Global Social Venture Competitions, and the history of lasting success at places like Echoing Green there is finally reason for hope that Texas might be at least realizing the need to play catch up with some of the other top universities in the country with some preliminary initiatives. Obviously SBIG is going to be excited to see how this plays out in the long term since it will have a measurable impact on our efforts to build the market for social enterprise business services in Texas, but there’s another reason we’re going to be following the goings-on in Austin quite closely…and it’s got a lot to do with the short term potential here…things we can accomplish right now. Next year when the 250 students in the Townview Magnet Center’s social enterprise program begin working with local community non profits, socially responsible businesses and small entrepreneurs to hone their practical skills in real world applications, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when so many sharp kids can also hook up with university students throughout Texas in collaborative projects that will boost their marketability and attractiveness to some of the best business schools in the world. Are you listening SMU? You should be…that sound you hear is Harvard Business School poking around in your backyard.