When President Barack Obama recently visited Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh campus to announce the launch of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, he noted that entrepreneurship defines the university in many ways: “At its founding, no one would have imagined that a trade school for the sons and daughters of steelworkers would one day become one of the region’s largest employers and a global research university. And yet, innovations led by your professors and your students have created more than 300 companies and 9,000 jobs over the past 15 years.”
Sounds good. But, for you, a Carnegie Mellon student, creating companies and jobs seems far removed from the sketches you’ve been working on in your dorm room. Right now, all you have is an idea. You believe it’s a good idea, but “entrepreneurship” is just a word. It doesn’t tell you how to make into bricks and mortar what exists only on graph paper and computer files.
Richard McCullough understands such exasperation. As a graduate student, he had an idea for printable electronic devices, components like solar cells, which could be mass produced for use in LEDs and other technologies. The problem was that no market existed for the devices, because until McCullough came up with the idea, there was no such thing. So he had to knock on doors, meet with incredulous investors, try to explain to bank guys the intricacies of regioregular polythiophenes synthesis. Now, there is a massive market for the devices, and McCullough’s company, Plextronics, with $41 million in equity capital, is poised to be a world leader in the industry. But at the time? He was just a kid with an idea.
“Traditionally, there’s no career path for ‘entrepreneur,’” explains McCullough, today the vice president for research at Carnegie Mellon. “Entrepreneur is usually defined as the opposite of a career path, blazing a totally new trail with no safety net. The question for Carnegie Mellon is, ‘How do you help people blaze those trails?’”
For you, back in your dorm room, you open Carnegie Mellon’s homepage and do a search for “entrepreneur.” The results are links on how to blaze those trails:
- The Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at Tepper, which pairs entrepreneurs with the expertise and business acumen of that school’s faculty and students.
- The Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation, which helps entrepreneurs with, among other issues, licensing and copyrights.
- The Quality of Life Technology Foundry, which matches entrepreneurs with a veteran business person to explore an idea’s commercial potential.
- Project Olympus, which specializes in bringing ideas to the development and business stages.
Just one glitch. You’re set to graduate in a week. But you eye a new link:
- Open Field Entrepreneurs Fund, recently created by Jonathan Kaplan (TPR’90), the inventor of the FLip video camera.
It’s the university’s latest entrepreneurial incubator, joining the other four to make up Greenlighting Startups, an initiative that promotes turning campus innovations into sustainable businesses. The fund offers recent Carnegie Mellon graduates a chance for early-stage financing for ideas that could one day morph into the kind of businesses that caught the attention of President Obama.
So you click on cmu.edu/openfield, open the application form, and start typing.
—Bradley A. Porter (HS’08)
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