By Shera Dalin
Universities across the St. Louis metropolitan region are creating
better training and learning opportunities for entrepreneurs
like never before.
Recognizing that not every entrepreneur has a business degree,
10 institutions of higher learning formed the St. Louis Region
Entrepreneur Educators group. The coalition offers resources,
training and an improved entrepreneurial environment, organizers
say. The ultimate aim is to catapult entrepreneurs to success
and strengthen the area’s economy.
“We all have a common vision of building a region of entrepreneurs,”
says Kevin Schulte, director of the Smurfit-Stone Center for
Entrepreneurship at Saint Louis University. “The community would
be pleased.”
Schulte and entrepreneurship leaders at Washington University
and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, began forming
the coalition in spring 2006. Kristine Jarden, director of the
Entrepreneurship Center at SIUE, was part of the beginning.
“We are all doing entrepreneurship, so we said ‘Why don’t we
all join forces?’” Jarden says.
Because many of the area’s colleges offer entrepreneurship training
in some form, the members of the coalition began sharing information
to avoid duplication.
“We each co-market each others’ programs,” Schulte says.
One example was Entrepreneur Week in the spring. The STLREE
members coordinated all of the events and offerings for that
week, says Ken Harrington, director of the Skandalaris Center
for Entrepreneurial Studies at Washington University.
“We are swapping curriculum and we worked on the whole Entrepreneurship
Week together,” he says.
“We have tried to do things where students, faculty and the
community can collaborate and benefit. The big thing we did
to impact the environment is we’ve tried to create a continuum
of support for entrepreneurs.”
One of their first actions was to create a joint Website, www.STLRee.org,
that would give entrepreneurs a starting point to discover the
array of resources available in the area. The Website has a
matrix of services, degrees and business assistance centers
listed by institution.
“The bottom line is that we are trying to leverage our respective
resources so we are not duplicating resources,” Schulte says.
“(We want to) make sure they are being allocated judiciously
and to project each of our programs in a bigger way.
“For example, SLU is pretty strong on the family business area,
so (other universities) just refer people to us,” he says.
SIUE offers a business showcase for high school and junior high
school students that includes judging based on business idea,
business cards and formal presentations. The winners are offered
scholarships to attend entrepreneurship camps at SLU and SIUE’s
sister campus Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
SIUE also has a program funded by the state of Illinois to help
high-growth-potential companies with grants for a variety of
needs, including Website development, feasibility studies, marketing
or professional services such as legal or accounting. Grants
of up to $10,000 are available and must be matched by the company,
Jarden says.
“We have given out over $180,000 in the area to start-up companies
that we deemed were going to grow fast to existing companies,”
she says.
The center also focuses on boosting manufacturing startups and
its sister organization, the International Trade Center, connects
businesses that want to export with student researchers and
faculty who can help, Jarden says.
Wash U’s Skandarlaris Center has the Olin Cup competition and
IdeaBounce. Olin Cup, which opened to the public in 2003, allows
entrepreneurs to refine their business plans and compete for
$125,000 in seed money provided by the Youthbridge, Incarnate
Word and Deaconess foundations.
Winners of the Olin Cup benefit from the spotlight that shines
on them, sometimes yielding venture capital or more seed money,
Harrington says. After winning the Olin Cup in 2005, Somark
Innovations Inc. of St. Louis attracted the attention of venture
capitalists and received much-desired funding for its radio-frequency
identification ink system, Harrington says.
In the IdeaBounce event, similar opportunities emerged. Budding
or active entrepreneurs explain their ideas during a formal
two-minute presentation and the five best presenters get to
have a mentoring dinner with the judges immediately afterward.
The idea is to help entrepreneurs who may be only at the idea
stage work through their concept in preparation for writing
a business plan and seeking funding.
One presenter, One World Neighborhood Café, planned to provide
employment for immigrant and incarcerated women working together
to deliver business lunches. After the presentation, an audience
member offered to give the venture a standing order of 8,000
lunches to get started, Harrington says.
Similarly, Smurfit-Stone, which celebrates its 20th year as
an entrepreneurship center this fall, offers the Idea-to-Product
Competition. I2P is for entrepreneurs who have concrete, but
complex or high-tech concepts, yet no business plans.
The competition awarded $5,000 this year to a new bookbinding
system developed by Livre Libre, founded by Rania El-Sorrogy
out of DePaul University. Homegrown winners include Abd-El-Rahman
Abd-El-Barr and Kimberly Ferguson from SLU with FloSure, a medical
device that streamlines blood collection, as well as fellow
SLU student Ryan Knoblauch, who created Warp Wing, an aircraft
wing design that improves aerodynamics.
“It’s really a great thing,” Schulte says. “It fills that gap
of more complex, bigger ideas and helps move them down from
idea to implementation.”
Skandalaris also offers Coffee with the Experts, where entrepreneurs
can get advice from experienced business people or service professionals
during 10-minute, intensive “coffee breaks.”
“More than anything we educate and encourage,” Harrington says.
“Everybody in economic support tries to pick winners. We don’t
do that,” he says. “We try to support everybody and we let the
market pick.”
Also in the realm of funding, SLU offers its students a $500
microloan program and is launching an angel network similar
to Arch Angels. The Billiken Angel Network will consist of high-net
worth individuals who are interested in investing in startups.
SLU will match those investments with a $1 million fund it has
established, Schulte says.
“We are taking a fairly holistic approach from the basic block-and-tackle
skills to mentoring and coaching to investing in companies,”
he says.
Many of the universities offer mentoring programs with professors
in the areas of expertise that entrepreneurs need. And that’s
the key to the next step in improving the entrepreneurial environment
area-wide, Harrington says.
“What needs to happen now is discovering how to make it even
better,” he says.
