| VOLUME: 26, ISSUE: 1, SPRING 2014
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Special offer on the Upcoming Public Forum on Entrepreneurship Excellence
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Monday May 5, USASBE and the Whitewater area community will come together to celebrate Small Business and Entrepreneurship. The
Public Forum on Entrepreneurship Excellence promises to provide attendees with ways to increase their network while giving them the tools necessary to grow their businesses.
"There is going to be a ton of talent both on-stage and in the audience at this event." said Patrick Snyder, USASBE Executive Director. "We couldn’t be more excited about the way everything has come together and our partnership with UW-Whitewater." You can learn more about the day’s
agenda here.
Special offer for USASBE members: Use promo code COMMUNITY at checkout and the price goes from $75 to $25-and that includes lunch.
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Steve Kaplan coming to USASBE in May
The USASBE and UW-Whitewater Public Forum on Entrepreneurship Excellence on May 5th promises to be a great one. Among other top tier speakers, we will be hearing from and best selling Business Book of the Year author, Steve Kaplan.
Steve Kaplan is a serial entrepreneur, self-made multimillionaire and has helped to make more than 100 additional people millionaires in their own right. As one of the world’s leading experts on small business, success and achievement, he has written two New York Times bestselling books, including Bag the Elephant™ which was recently voted one of the Best Business Books of the past decade.
I recently had the opportunity to talk with Steve. He was most interesting on a number of topics. Here are some of the highlights:
On how to recognize opportunity:
Steve is a big proponent of creating your own opportunities. He suggests thinking about platforms, rather than products. What technology or business model do you have, and how that can be bigger, or be used in a different context.
“Well, for me” he says, “it has come as often as not as an epiphany one day. You have to have the ability to look at a situation, look at the products you have, and imagine what that will be when it is in a bigger context. Three years from now you won’t be doing it the same way, so what does that look like?” You can also look at all the cost components of your business model and think about how to turn them into an opportunity or advantage. These, for Steve, are what he calls “proactive” ways.
On leadership:
Steve believes that good leadership gets short shrift in the real world. There are so many books on leadership, and yet a large gap between theory and practice. He has three important points about leadership for entrepreneurs and small business owners: - Be a beacon of energy. Others will feed off that and follow. But if you don’t have that, their energy and enthusiasm will flag and falter. Especially with a small, lean team, that power of positive energy is the most important.
- Take a back seat on praise. Strong leadership is about the team’s success not the leader’s success. Creating great organizations of wonderful people takes delegation, empowerment (and those are different) and giving full credit and praise. Small businesses and start-ups are often very dependent on the owners. Push down that responsibility and help the team grow past your knowledge.
- Build a culture conducive to winning. To create a healthy culture you need to man up and take the hits to protect your team. Be the first through the door and run interference so the team can move ahead without fear. Instill a culture of finding solutions, not stopping at problems.
On how to encourage students of entrepreneurship:
“True entrepreneurs” says Steve, “don’t separate business life from personal life. It’s all one life.” By this he doesn’t mean they are workaholics. He sees much value to both business and family in maintaining a balanced life. He suggests building entrepreneurship into life at the University, because ideas come from any source and can be used in any context. For example, he suggests structuring exercises around problem solving in a way that encourages the cross-pollination of ideas.
“Not a day goes by” he says, “when you don’t have five problems to solve. Some bigger. Some smaller. It’s a question of how quickly you can process them and make it so they don’t recur. It really comes down to who makes fewer mistakes. If you make only three where you might otherwise have made 10, then you are further along.” Encourage students to learn by doing and to start early while they still have the energy for it. “Entrepreneurship requires lots of energy because you fail 3 times for every time you succeed, so you have to have enough energy to go for it again for the fourth time.”
Steve also suggests having a watering hole. A place where student entrepreneurs congregate with each other and with mentors to share ideas and find answers to the constant question every entrepreneur lives: “Now what?”
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Law & Entrepreneurship SIG in Fourth Year of Operation
Since its inception in 2011, the
Law SIG has been very active at the USASBE annual conference, in mid-year initiatives, and in collaborations with other SIGs. It has held a preconference at each of the last four USASBE annual conferences, the latest, under the leadership of 2013 Law SIG Chair Eden Blair (Bradley University), being a half-day session this past January on Legal Issues in Entrepreneurship: Understanding How the Law Affects Entrepreneurs, Universities and Students. At the regular conference, it has successfully encouraged its members to present papers and workshops, and promoted attendance at such sessions.
Interdisciplinary collaborations with other SIGs have included joint sessions with the Public Policy SIG at the USASBE conference (one in 2013 on proposed U.S. immigration law reforms to assist foreign student entrepreneurs, and one in 2014 on crowdfunding and related securities regulation considerations), and work with the Social Entrepreneurship SIG and USASBE President Tony Mendes on the design and implementation of the USASBE Certificate in Social Entrepreneurship, and the delivery of the “law module” in that program at multiple locations at various conferences across the country since November of 2012.
In 2014 the Law SIG, which now has approximately 140 members, is being co-chaired by Giles Hertz (University of Tampa), Tony Luppino (University of Missouri-Kansas City) and Malika Simmons (University of Missouri-Kansas City). Its planned initiatives this year include: developing a proposal for another collaboration with the Public Policy SIG (this time on intersections of the Affordable Care Act and entrepreneurship); continuation of its work in the Social Entrepreneurship Certificate Program; providing assistance to the Technology and Life Sciences SIG on a legal module for its planned certificate program; developing a strong listserv and materials sharing functions and interaction at mid-year events of interest to Law SIG members; designing a proposed “law track” set of session for the USASBE annual conference; and coordinating the interaction of many of its members, including those with experience with particular areas of law (such as, for example, intellectual property, health care, issues for artists, financing, securities, taxation, and international law), with other SIGs interested in teaching or research on legal issues. As announced at a SIG Chairs meeting in January, and in subsequent conference calls, Law SIG Co-Chair Tony Luppino will serve as point person on the latter initiative—SIGs interested in exploring collaborations on certificate programs, joint conference sessions, or other endeavors can contact him to discuss at
luppinoa@umkc.edu .
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| Entrepreneurship Pedagogy & Teaching SIG Celebrates Teaching and Learning
The
Entrepreneurship Pedagogy & Teaching Special Interest Group is looking to actively encourage, support, and celebrate entrepreneurship teaching and learning. This includes innovation in course and curricular delivery, development and production of teaching materials, and educational periodicals. We embrace the challenge of entrepreneurship education at the undergraduate and graduate levels, in all post secondary education institutions, as well as programs for adults of all ages.
Our Pedagogy group has been active in the annual USASBE meeting by hosting its own competitive paper track as well as a general track of sessions thr
oughout the meeting. We are renewing the syllabus exchange with the intention to provide any member with an example of a current syllabus in a particular area of interest or keyword. Please look forward to this exciting development and announcement. Another initiative we have is to provide experiential exercise examples that may help members in achieving a particular goal. These exercises will be categorized in the same fashion as the syllabi. Please look for the call for any good examples you may have to share with your peers, and then share!
We also feel strongly about helping our members get published, especially those who may be new to their position and have tenure requirements including peer reviewed publication. Our sig actively works with a number of journal editors in aligning publication opportunities, and on occasion we have helped with special issues pertaining to entrepreneurship education. The first step in this sig helping aspiring authors is to encourage and help authors submit competitive papers to the annual meeting.
The 2014 Pedagogy SIG is the largest group with 137 members and is currently chaired by Jeff Vanevenhoven (University of Wisconsin at Whitewater). In addition to the syllabus exchange refresher and experiential exercise repository, additional planned initiatives include the case exchange, a module based repository and a special issue journal based on papers presented at the conference. We have the intention to develop an area to assist with assessment and all of the complexities that will go into assessing courses and programs. Lastly, we are working on an area focusing on course and program development (to coincide with assessment).
We had a wonderful turnout for our business meeting at the conference at TCU. If you were there, or if you simply have an interest in exploring the pedagogy sig, please feel free to contact Jeff Vanevenhoven at
vanevenj@uww.edu
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| The USASBE Certificate in Social Entrepreneurship In Collaboration with UMKC | UNT | Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City
We are pleased to announce another opportunity for our members who have an interest in Social Entrepreneurship. USASBE will launch its fourth class in the Social Entrepreneurship Certificate Program this May in collaboration with The Kauffman Foundation, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of North Texas. There are eight modules (workshops) that are required for completion of the certificate.
The first three of these modules will be offered at the Midwest Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship on May 19-20th, modules 4, 5 and 6 will be offered at the USASBE 2015 conference in Tampa, Florida and a third offering (final modules, 7 and 8) in spring of 2015 at UMKC.
Read more.
LEARN FROM TOP FACULTY IN SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Faculty who have developed the curriculum, and who will be delivering the modules, are among the top faculty in this emerging field of Social Entrepreneurship, so you will be learning from the best. Each module also offers a set of resources, such as PowerPoint presentations, cases, articles, annotated bibliography of literature with links to on-line resources and an assortment of class exercises/assignments used by faculty teaching social entrepreneurship. On-line resources are offered exclusively to certificate participants.
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| Save the Date!
Save the date for USASBE 2015, January 22-25, 2015 at the Downtown Tampa Hilton in Tampa, Florida. This year's theme is Sun, Fun & Innovation: Advancing Entrepreneurship Teaching and Research hosted by The University of Tampa.
Click here for the
Preliminary Call for Papers. Online submissions will be accepted online starting June 9, 2014. More details will be posted as they become available at
USASBE 2015 Conference Home.
The 2015 USASBE Program Chair and VP Conference is Amy Brownlee, The University of Tampa. For questions about next year's Conference, contact her at
abrownlee@ut.edu or 813-257-3770.
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Help USASBE Membership Programs by Donating a Silent Auction Item!
One of the most anticipated 2015 USASBE conference activities this year will be our fabulous Silent Auction. Funds from the auction are used to support programs for USASBE membership. Patrick Snyder, Executive Director—USASBE is coordinating this conference event and needs your assistance with auction prizes. We are looking for overnight getaway packages, restaurant certificates, wine tastings, and attraction tickets...anything you can donate to create special offerings.
To have a Donation Form sent out. Patrick’s email is
psnyder@usasbe.org. Let’s help get some fantastic prizes for the auction for this year’s event. Thanks in advance for your assistance.
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