Startup Schools: America's Most Entrepreneurial Universities 07-31

Startup Schools: America's Most Entrepreneurial Universities

Stanford University

For the second time, Stanford University out-muscled its East Coast rivals to top the FORBES 2014 most entrepreneurial universities list. Silicon Valley’s reach has extended across California, as the state’s schools took over half of this year’s top ten spots.

FORBES ranked the nation’s most entrepreneurial research universities based on their entrepreneurial ratios – the number of alumni and students who have identified themselves as founders and business owners on LinkedInagainst the school’s total student body (undergraduate and graduate combined).

Here are the highlights of the top 20 start-up schools on our list:

1 Stanford University

Its entrepreneurs don’t always wait for degrees. Among its famous dropouts:Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and David Filo; and Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel.

2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Its student-run $100K Entrepreneurship Competition has led to the creation of more than 130 companies and 2,500 jobs.

3 University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley has three startup incubators on campus, including SkyDeck, a joint effort of the university’s research office and its business and engineering schools.

4 Cornell University

Founded in 2001, the Cornell Entrepreneur Network has organized hundreds of events for about 20,000 alumni, students, staff, parents and friends (read my colleague Natalie Robehmed’s profile on Cornell).

5 University of California, Los Angeles

State school UCLA hosted 4,000 developers
in April for the second annual LA Hacks hackathon.

6 California Institute of Technology

Caltech boasts 32 alumni and faculty Nobel laureates despite a total student body of fewer than 2,300 in Pasadena.

7 Brown University

Popular professor Barrett Hazeltine has been teaching entrepreneurship and engineering for about half a century. Former students include the founders of Nantucket Nectars.

8 Princeton University

Summa cum laude grad Jeff Bezos was president of its Students for the Exploration & Development of Space. He donated $15 million to build its neuroscience research center.

9 Pepperdine University

Associated with the Churches of Christ, this private school in California counts among its alums eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren.

10 Dartmouth College

Dartmouth’s Entrepreneurial Network (DEN) has provided support for over 500 projects and companies since 2001.

11 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

RPI, established in Troy, N.Y. in 1824, claims to be the oldest science and technology school in the English-speaking world.

12 Yale University

Telecom mogul John Malone got his start as an electrical engineering student at Yale; he has since donated $74 million to the engineering school.

13 Clark University

Matthew Goldman turned his economic lessons at Clark into Blue Man Group, now a multimillion-dollar show across the country that he cofounded.

14 Syracuse University

Private equity titan Daniel D’Aniello, a magna cum laude graduate, funds an internship program that gives 20 students hands-on entrepreneurial experience each year.

15 Southern Methodist University

Selected students at SMU’s business school gain firsthand venture capital experience by running the Cox MBA Venture Fund.

16 New York University

NYU will open a 5,900-square-foot Entrepreneurs Lab in the heart of Greenwich Village this fall for students to exchange ideas.

17 Howard University

Sean “Diddy” Combs got his honorary doctorate degree earlier this year almost 25 years after dropping out of the school to build his music empire.

18 San Diego State University

Rubio’s Grill cofounder Ralph Rubio enjoyed his first fish taco while on spring break from SDSU; the company now has more than 190 restaurants nationwide.

19 University of Colorado, Boulder

The university got a $4 million grant from Blackstone Group to build an entrepreneurs network for the state.

20 University of California, Santa Barbara

In July UCSB and the nearby city of Goleta opened a 4,500-square-foot incubator in Oldtown Goleta.

The rest of the top 50 universities are:

21 University of San Francisco

22 University of Southern California

23 The University of Texas at Austin

24 Carnegie Mellon University

25 University of Miami

26 Northwestern University

27 University of Denver

28 Boston University

29 American University

30 Brigham Young University

31 Miami University-Oxford

32 Brandeis University

33 Florida Institute of Technology

34 Harvard University

35 University of Maryland-College Park

36 Hofstra University

37 Southern Illinois University Carbondale

38 University of Tulsa

39 Tufts University

40 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

41 University of Notre Dame

42 University of Pennsylvania

43 University of Washington-Seattle

44 Clarkson University

45 Lehigh University

46 Pennsylvania State University

47 University of San Diego

48 Boston College

49 Colorado State University

50 Rice University

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Humble CEOs Are Best For Business, New Study Says 07-30

Humble CEOs Are Best For Business, New Study Says

James Collins, author of the 2001 business classic Good to Great, likes to tellthe story of Darwin E. Smith, the shy, reserved CEO of Kimberly-Clark for two decades until 1991. When Smith was asked how he turned around the maker of Kleenex and Huggies, generating returns to investors that were four times better than the stock market’s, Collins quotes him as saying, “I was just trying to become qualified for the job.”

Though Collins has described how humility can make leaders better at their jobs, there has been a striking absence of empirical research to back up that notion, says Angelo Kinicki, management professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. Most CEO studies look at the flip side of the personality coin. For instance I recently wrote about a study showing that narcissistic CEOs who run tech companies make more money than their less dominant, less entitled counterparts.

Kinicki was thinking of testing the proposition that humble CEOs like Darwin Smith could be powerful leaders, when one of his graduate students, China-born Amy Ou, suggested it would be interesting to look at some of the leadership traits associated with Confucianism. Those traits include self-awareness, openness to feedback, and a focus on the greater good and others’ welfare, as opposed to dwelling on oneself. Ou, who is now an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, thought that China would be a good place to gather data, because of Confucianism’s influence. She also had a network of corporate contacts there and she teamed up with another Chinese colleague at the business school, Anne Tsui, who had connections in China.

Together with three other colleagues in the U.S. and China, the researchers wound up interviewing the CEOs of 63 private Chinese companies. They also gave surveys to 1,000 top- and mid-level managers who worked with the CEOs. The surveys and interviews aimed to determine how a humble leadership style would affect not so much the bottom line as the top and mid-level managers who worked under the CEOs. Did managers feel empowered by CEOs’ humility, did they feel as though they were invited into company decision-making, and did that lead to a higher level of activity and engagement?

The study was a challenge to complete because the researchers had to quiz the CEOs about whether they regarded themselves as humble and then test that judgment with mid- and upper-level management. “We had a whole separate study validating that finding,” says Kinicki. The study rated the CEOs’ humility on a 1-6 scale, with the mean falling at 4.47; in other words, most of the CEOs tended to be more humble than not.

The study’s conclusion: The more humble the CEO, the more top- and mid-level managers reported positive reactions. Top-level managers said they felt their jobs were more meaningful, they wanted to participate more in decision-making, they felt more confident about doing their work and they had a greater sense of autonomy. They also were more motivated to collaborate, to make decisions jointly and to share information. Likewise middle managers felt more engaged and committed to their jobs when the top boss was more humble.

How likely is it that these findings would translate to the U.S.? “I think humble leaders in the U.S. will have the same cascading influence on others as they do in China,” says Kinicki. “People like to be empowered and they like to be treated fairly. That’s as true in the U.S. as it is in other parts of the world.”

But the researchers studied companies in China in part because the tradition of Confucianism is so strong there, and thus they thought it was more likely they would find a greater number of CEOs who exhibited humble characteristics than they could in the U.S. “The U.S. is one of the most individualistic nations in the world,” says Kinicki. “If you’re very individualistic, it’s kind of hard to be humble.”

Still, American bosses would do well to pay attention to the new study, which is published in the Administrative Sciences Quarterly.

Kinicki is in the process of conducting similar research on U.S. CEOs. His goal: to determine how CEO humility affects financial performance. His guess is that humble CEOs like Darwin Smith have a positive effect on the bottom line. “There is a negative stereotype that humble people are weak and indecisive,” Kinicki says. “That’s just not the case.”

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Flipkart raises $1 billion to strengthen its bid to own India’s e-commerce space 07-29

Flipkart raises $1 billion to strengthen its bid to own India’s e-commerce space

It’s turning into quite a year for Flipkart. Today the e-commerce company from India has confirmed the much-reported rumor that it has raised $1 billion in fresh investment, as it eyes new verticals, expand its operations and stave off challenges from Amazon and eBay.

 An announcement confirms that the round includes participation from existing investors Tiger Global, Yuri Milner’s DST Global group, Accel Partners, ICONIQ Capital, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Sofina. Prior to today’s news, Flipkart had taken just over $700 million from investors.

The company most recently raised $210 million back in May, just after it acquired fashion-focused rival Myntra for an undisclosed fee which was said to be around $300 million. Since then, we have seen Flipkart launch its own line of tablets andsmartphones, in addition to an Amazon Prime-like members service that provides a host of benefits for 500 INR, around US$8.50, per year.

Why all the investor interest in e-commerce in India?

The increase in capital is about giving the company a footprint to succeed in India’s e-commerce market that has vast potential as internet penetration and the rate of smartphone ownership increases. A report from Accel Partners earlier this year predicts that the number of online shoppers will double to 40 million by 2016, with their spending set to increase four-fold to $8.5 million.

Speaking to Quartz, Kunal Bahl, the CEO of Flipkart’s closest rival Snapdeal, predicted that the value of the online shopping market in India could reach $50 billion by 2020. That’s a whole lot of potential.

“We believe the internet will improve the quality of life for millions of Indians, and e-commerce is going to play a huge role in this change. The focus at Flipkart is to continue to make shopping online simpler and more accessible through the use of technology,” said Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal in a statement.

Flipkart claims 18 million registered users and 3.5 million visits to its site per day, and it claims to be the first e-commerce firm outside of the US to reach $1 billion in GMV (sales on its marketplace). Yet, it has two US giants breathing down its neck. Amazon quietly moved into the India market last June. It began selling books only, but now offers music, movies, electronics, fashion and other categories that Flipkart covers too.

eBay also has plans for the Indian market, after it invested in Snapdeal with a view to a future acquisition. Snapdeal itself recently raised $100 million from five investors as well, including Singapore’s Temasek Holdings.

Image via Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay / Flickr

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NASA's SDO Observes a Lunar Transit 07-28

NASA's SDO Observes a Lunar Transit

By bl

› 

This animated gif shows the path of the moon across the Solar Dynamics Observatory's field of view for this lunar transit.

Image Credit: 

NASA/SDO team

On July 26, 2014, from 10:57 a.m. to 11:42 a.m. EDT, the moon crossed between NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and the sun, a phenomenon called a lunar transit. This happens approximately twice a year, causing a partial solar eclipse that can only be seen from SDO's point of view. Images of the eclipse show a crisp lunar horizon, because the moon has no atmosphere that would distort light.

Crowd funding is the Highest Form of Loyalty: Shared Destiny 07-29

Crowd funding is the Highest Form of Loyalty: Shared Destiny 

Harvest a thousand ideas. Above photo from popular photographer, and my friend, Thomas Hawk.

Crowdfunding is the highest form of loyalty, and only a few big companies have deployed this crowd strategy.

Big companies can learn from Indiegogo, and Kickstarter.
You’ve heard of Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and other crowdfunding platforms for the tech savvy, but what does it mean to corporate product strategy? Today’s crowdfunding projects often include a litanay of odd products that didn’t make the shelves, I jokingly refer to it as “this decades home shopping network” due to the odd ball products you didn’t realize you needed. These “long tail” products, are examples of grassroots market innovation offering an opportunity for entrepreneurs to get pre-orders, pre-funded, and free marketing to support a future business.

U-Haul Investors Club spurs crowdfunding strategy.For years, marketers have told themselves that repeat sales is the highest form of loyalty, but I’d like extend that we’re now seeing the greatest level of loyalty, crowdfunding, become an untapped opportunity for even large companies to develop. Let’s take U-Haul Investors Club for example, where the crowd can finance and own parts of the loading equipment often at better rates than traditional banks. In return, they receive periodic revenues from the performance of these vehicles. It’s safe to assume, that when it’s time for folks to move homes, these U-Haul Investors will use these services, as well as advocate to their friends.

GE taps crowd innovation from Quirky.
With that said, this is just the first phase of the crowdfunding movement, expect more refined versions to appear, akin to GE’s Quirky program, where the crowd submits ideas, a smaller team selects, and GEs massive production and supply chain is able to create –and distribute at scale. For the inventors who submit ideas, they benefit from their name being on the box, shared revenues, and a chance to see their brainchild hit shelves –without even going to a fabrication plant.

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What are the benefits of Corporate Crowdfunding?

1. A nearly limitless supply of fresh innovation and ideas. Struggling to get fresh ideas to market? Is your company mandate to foster outside-in innovation, tap crowdfunding principles to start your journey for crowd innovation.
2. Backers pre-pledge to go the journey with you. These backers are telling entrepreneurs, and even large corporations that they’re committed for a long period of development in exchange for early access, perks, or even financial benefits.
3. They’re engaged with product development. This engaged community can be counted on for active feedback, although they are likely representative of a passionista contingent, not a mainstream audience.
4. A built-in set of early adopters. In both Kickstarter and Indiegogo, most benefits include perks, which include special services, recognition, or gifts, a few of them result in the early product being shipped. Tap these early adopters for feedback and word of mouth.
5. They’ll naturally advocate the product. Being engaged means to commit fully, and these crowd-based backers are invested in your future product with time, money, and often reputation. Assume they’ll advocate your products to their network and beyond.

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Opportunities for corporate product strategy.
Using the same consumer-type strategies as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, allow the crowd to suggest products, and then fund them, for potential development, akin to GE’s successful Quirky program, which has now extended beyond consumer electronics to appliances. Allow the crowd to drive the initial discussions, ideation. Allow a system for IP, rights, and rewards to be shared between inventors and your own company.

Below Graphic: Crowdfunding behavior set to double
Adoption numbers of 90,000 respondents from my recent research with Vision Critical shows that Crowdfunding will double in adoption by US, UK, and Canadian general population.

Corporate crowdfunding is uncharted territory.
What’s the one major downside of Crowdfunding programs? Many a project doesn’t see the light of day, and if it does, it may not be a global success. Additioanlly, some companies are afflicted with the “if it’s not invented here” syndrome which limits innovation to only engineers and scientists. Here’s where established brands can help make the right choices, apply the right resources, and help both crowds –and companies –win. While relatively untapped, corporations can adapt this new strategy, to obtain the highest form of loyalty, crowdfunding, for shared destiny with the crowd.

Crowdfunding is the highest form of loyalty: shared destiny

(Disclosure: GE is a founding member of my company, Crowd Companies, an association for business leaders at large companies.) 

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Glucose ‘control switch’ in the brain key to both types of diabetes 07-29

Glucose ‘control switch’ in the brain key to both types of diabetes

 

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have pinpointed a mechanism in part of the brain that is key to sensing glucose levels in the blood, linking it to both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. The findings are published in the July 28 issue of Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

“We’ve discovered that the prolyl endopeptidase enzyme — located in a part of the hypothalamus known as the ventromedial nucleus — sets a series of steps in motion that control glucose levels in the blood,” said lead author Sabrina Diano, professor in the Departments of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences, Comparative Medicine, and Neurobiology at Yale School of Medicine. “Our findings could eventually lead to new treatments for diabetes.”

The ventromedial nucleus contains cells that are glucose sensors. To understand the role of prolyl endopeptidase in this part of the brain, the team used mice that were genetically engineered with low levels of this enzyme. They found that in absence of this enzyme, mice had high levels of glucose in the blood and became diabetic.

Diano and her team discovered that this enzyme is important because it makes the neurons in this part of the brain sensitive to glucose. The neurons sense the increase in glucose levels and then tell the pancreas to release insulin, which is the hormone that maintains a steady level of glucose in the blood, preventing diabetes.

“Because of the low levels of endopeptidase, the neurons were no longer sensitive to increased glucose levels and could not control the release of insulin from the pancreas, and the mice developed diabetes.” said Diano, who is also a member of the Yale Program in Integrative Cell Signaling and Neurobiology of Metabolism.

Diano said the next step in this research is to identify the targets of this enzyme by understanding how the enzyme makes the neurons sense changes in glucose levels. “If we succeed in doing this, we could be able to regulate the secretion of insulin, and be able to prevent and treat type 2 diabetes,” she said.

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Motivation may explain disconnect between cognitive testing and real-life functioning for older adults 07-29

Photo credit: Flickr user Bryan (Creative Commons)

Motivation may explain disconnect between cognitive testing and real-life functioning for older adults

COGNITION

A psychology researcher at North Carolina State University is proposing a new theory to explain why older adults show declining cognitive ability with age, but don’t necessarily show declines in the workplace or daily life. One key appears to be how motivated older adults are to maintain focus on cognitive tasks.

“My research team and I wanted to explain the difference we see in cognitive performance in different settings,” says Dr. Tom Hess, a professor of psychology at NC State and author of a paper describing the theory. “For example, laboratory tests almost universally show that cognitive ability declines with age, so you would expect older adults to perform worse in situations that rely on such abilities, such as job performance – but you don’t. Why is that? That’s what this theoretical framework attempts to address.”

Hess has been developing this framework, called “selective engagement,” over the past 10 years, based on years of work on the psychology of aging.

At issue are cognitive performance and cognitive functioning. Both deal with cognition, which is an individual’s ability to focus on complex mental tasks, switch between tasks, tune out distractions and retain a good working memory. However, cognitive performance generally refers to how people fare under test conditions, whereas cognitive functioning usually refers to an individual’s ability to deal with mental tasks in daily life.

“There’s a body of work in psychology research indicating that performing complex mental tasks is more taxing for older adults,” Hess says. “This means older adults have to work harder to perform these tasks. In addition, it takes older adults longer to recover from this sort of exertion. As a result, I argue that older adults have to make decisions about how to prioritize their efforts.”

This is where selective engagement comes in. The idea behind the theory is that older adults are more likely to fully commit their mental resources to a task if they can identify with the task or consider it personally meaningful. This would explain the disparity between cognitive performance in experimental settings and cognitive functioning in the real world.

“This first occurred to me when my research team saw that cognitive performance seemed to be influenced by how we framed the tasks in our experiments,” Hess says. “Tasks that people found personally relevant garnered higher levels of cognitive performance than more abstract tasks.”

Hess next hopes to explore the extent to which selective engagement is reflected in the daily life of older adults and the types of activities they choose to engage in.

“This would not only further our understanding of cognition and aging, it may also help researchers identify possible interventions to slow declines in cognitive functioning,” Hess says.

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