Recently, University of Michigan Provost Martha Pollack announced that the school would soon launch a campus-wide entrepreneurship program. The Stephen M. Ross School of Business and the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan teamed to create a new master of entrepreneurship degree program in which students from every major can participate. The creation of this overarching entrepreneurship program makes its rich resources available to all students and encourages a greater degree of collaboration between students involved in radically different fields of study, generating innumerable opportunities for creativity and innovation as they gain access to local startups.
The campus-wide entrepreneurship program links several entrepreneurial programs developed at the University of Michigan in recent years. The initiative also creates an important precedent that may influence other institutions around the nation to offer similar opportunities for their students. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate dean for entrepreneurial programs at the College of Engineering, designed the program. The University is currently funding the effort, but Zurbuchen plans to reach out to third-party investors in the near future.
Rick Bolander, managing partner of San Francisco-based venture
capital investment firm Gabriel Venture Partners (GVP), maintains close
ties to many of the high-technology companies he has assisted over the
years. Bolander currently serves as a member of the board of directors
of Chegg, Inc., a leading online textbook rental company that prides
itself on giving back to its community through its nonprofit arm, Chegg
for Good.
Chegg recently partnered with Techbridge, a pioneering
organization offering science and technology-centered extracurricular
programs for girls in the Bay Area since 2000. In a day-long event,
Chegg opened its doors to more than a dozen young women aged 11 to 13 to
show them its state-of-the-art operations. The students, in a
Techbridge program at their charter school, learned about Chegg’s
website, tested in-house equipment and services, and spent time with
female engineering staff, who served as informal mentors.
To
date, Techbridge has worked with more than 4,000 elementary- and middle
school-aged girls to give them hands-on experience in the worlds of STEM
(science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects in the real
world. The group aims to show young women and underrepresented minority
students the full range of college and career options available to them
in these increasingly vital fields.
Rick Bolander and his staff
at GVP continue to work with start-up companies with the same potential
and commitment that Chegg has demonstrated since its founding.
Cavan Canavan, who earned his master of business administration at the University of Michigan, conceived of his big idea while weight training. He experienced trouble keeping track of the exercises that became part of his regular routines and began seeking out a device to meet his needs. Surprised by a glaring lack of suitable instruments, he created Focus Solutions, a wearable device paired with an application that records workouts while also providing coaching services and making recommendations. Individuals simply wear the device while working out; it automatically recognizes the type of exercise and begins registering sets, repetitions, and rest periods. The device offers real-time audio and visual feedback via smartphones.
To found Focus Solutions, Canavan collaborated with another University of Michigan graduate, Grant Hughes. The pair capitalized on the many services available to entrepreneurs at the University of Michigan to create the company. One of these resources is the Entrepreneurship Clinic at the university’s law school, which connected Canavan and Hughes to complimentary legal assistance on matters related to intellectual property and corporate structure. Canavan and Hughes are now focused on raising angel funding and hope to begin selling a product this spring.
