Experiences of Successful Center Directors - Baylor University

Curriculum
banking. Natalie Taylor is interested in social entrepreneurship. She is going to
introduce a course and is busy writing cases and doing research.
As mentioned earlier, the very first entrepreneurship course was a graduate
course in 1967. We offered our first undergraduate major in 1979. In 1985, when
I joined Babson, there were maybe 10 entrepreneurship undergraduate majors.
Last year, it was the most popular undergraduate major on campus. Of the 400
or so students graduated, more than 100 were entrepreneurship, either single
majors or joint or double majors. Along the way we have raised money for scholarships
for undergraduates and grad students and so on.
In the MBA program, a major commitment was in 1992, when the school said we
are going to completely revamp our MBA program, literally throw out everything
we have and redo the first year of it. They made the first year highly integrative,
and the theme is entrepreneurial leadership in a global economy. It has been a
huge success both in terms of attracting students and the final product. We run
entrepreneurship as one of the themes throughout all of the first year. It is a
highly integrative program with faculty integrating a lot of just-in-time material for
the students, and, no question, that has been a huge hit for us. Simultaneously,
we put it into place in the fall of 1993. This year’s class—we are the fourth class
coming in—and in the undergraduate program, we started simultaneously in the
fall of ’93 a total integrative first-year course with our first-year students.
In the past, Babson incoming freshmen took a course called General Management,
in either their fall or spring year. For most of them it is as boring as all get
out, no matter how we try to make it better, putting our best faculty in and trying
different materials. When you are an 18-year-old and have never thought much
about management, it is pretty dry. John Neuman, on our MIS faculty, said, “Well,
we know they like entrepreneurship; that is one reason they come to Babson. We
know almost all of the youngsters like computers and information systems. Why
don’t we design a one-year course which would incorporate general management,
entrepreneurship and computers and make it a one-year program teamtaught
by an entrepreneurship and an information systems person.” And as part
of that program as well as getting all the information systems stuff and some
management and marketing, the students have to start a business in their second
semester as a class. So, there are 42 students per class.
We actually give the class $3,000 and tell them go and start a business in the
second semester. So it is always going to be a very short business. It has a
lifetime of about 14 weeks max. And we tell them that we would like the $3,000
back and any excess cash you made, we would like you to donate it to a charity
or a good cause of your own choice and oh, by the way, during the whole semester
we expect you to work meaningfully with that charity. It has been a phenom-
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