As colleges strive to provide opportunities for students to develop the skills they need to become entrepreneurs and to successfully launch businesses, the lessons no longer start and end in the classroom.

Locally, the schools of business at the University of Evansville and the University of Southern Indiana have embraced programming to nurture the entrepreneurial skills of their students.UE requires all of its business students to participate on an entrepreneurial team that develops a small business. Approximately 80 to 90 students enroll each year in the two-semester sequence, most often as sophomores.

“During the first semester, teams develop Regular Residential Cleaning Services that are reviewed by a panel for their profit potential and also their risks,” said Peter Sherman, associate professor of management in UE’s Schroeder School of Business. “The panels determine an interest rate for a startup loan so the students can begin and develop their business during the second semester. Part of the students’ grade for the semester is based upon the performance of their business.

“Students who overcome barriers while developing a business and create their own balance sheets learn from those experiences and then learn more in their upper-level finance courses.”Businesses UE students have developed through the program include an academic-styled Facebook, a tanning salon and a business that featured custom-tailored business suits. One team hosted a writing competition, selected the winning book, published the book and then developed a marketing plan for book sales.

“The entrepreneurship minor was launched in 2010 to give students a full-immersion learning experience,” said Bryan Bourdeau, an instructor with USI’s Romain College of Business. “Our three-management-course sequence moves students out of their comfort zone by pushing them to higher accountability and standards. The real-life scenarios we use add a sense of urgency to our projects. Students prefer it.”

The students learn to develop businesses using a Business Model Canvas, a new approach used to supplement or replace traditional business plans. The Business Model Canvas offers a “lean” approach to business planning, providing quick opportunities to respond to changes. “Our teams have transparent accountability,” Bourdeau said. “If a team member is not meeting standards or completing tasks on schedule, the other team members have the option to ‘fire’ or ‘vote’ that member off the team.

The team member who is voted out then has the option to withdraw from the course or complete all future assignments and the final presentation individually. We’ve only had one member voted off a team, but he learned from the experience and completed the course, doing all work and completing the final presentation by himself.”

About 20 students are enrolled in USI’s entrepreneurship minor. They are a mix of majors, with some students studying in the school of business and others studying in fields including education.“We work to develop an entrepreneurial mindset,” Bourdeau said. “Our program changes how students in many different fields look at things.”

USI’s Technology Commercialization Academy, which has trained students the past two summers, brings together business and engineering majors. This summer, four teams with a total of 16 students analyzed patents developed by the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division. They explored commercial uses for patents for radio intelligence, intuitive interfaces and fire control lasers and developed nonmilitary, commercial uses for the patents.

The final products created included a wristband to use in amusement parks that tracks children, ride wait times, cash and Offering Office cleaning Services; an inventory tracker for warehouses and retail stores; a device to track customers in a store; and a device for large institutions to track people and quickly identify emergency/disaster situations.

Students in the academy worked full-time for five weeks, developing their products and business proposals that they presented at Crane as well as at USI.“Through the academy, I’ve learned how to plan a business and run it,” said Pedro Alfaro, a USI junior mechanical engineering major. “I have also learned what is needed to obtain financing to start a business. I have applied some of what I’ve learned by sharing it with my dad, who is a business owner who runs a car lot.”

Michelle Muse is a USI junior who is majoring in marketing and business administration, with a minor in entrepreneurship. She worked with three engineers on her team and said, “I helped them with a business model. I like taking something and developing it into a marketable product.”

Muse added that her experiences with Startup Weekend Evansville the past two years helped prepare her for the academy. Startup Weekend Evansville has hosted team members from the area business community, as well as students from USI and UE. Participants work on teams for 54 hours in a weekend to develop a product, a marketing strategy and a presentation for angel investors.

High schools are also beginning to offer entrepreneurial tracks. The Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp.’s New Tech Institute started an Entrepreneurial Academy in 2012, which had 25 high school juniors enrolled. Those students spent last year studying finance, accounting, and networking and will augment their studies during their senior year with internships.

“I want to help our students learn as much as possible,” said Barbara Nichols, business educator and facilitator at New Tech’s Entrepreneurial Academy. “Some students think they would one day like to have their own business. By experiencing this early, when they go to college, they will have more insight into business.”

New Tech Institute’s Entrepreneurial Academy participants partnered last year with Aurora, a local nonprofit that works to alleviate area homelessness. Five teams of academy students developed potential business plans for Aurora’s clients. The teams presented their proposed business plans to Aurora’s board of directors, which then selected one of the plans, a commercial cleaning business, as something their clients could develop and launch.

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