The Cambridge-MIT Institute "Innovative Learning Methods" Workshop, Wednesday 20th March 2002 - Getting Enterprise onto the Curriculum.

Turning students into consultants to have a go at tackling the problems that keep local businessmen awake at night; running courses that treat students like entrepreneurs; and recognising the need to offer enterprise teaching to future professionals like student vets and architects. These were some of the ideas that surfaced on March 20th during a workshop in Durham organised by the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) for the UK Science Enterprise Centres. The workshop was on the problems and practicalities of making enterprise education much more widely available to UK undergraduates.

The event brought together representatives of 28 UK universities to share ideas about new teaching methods and other initiatives to increase enterprise among the student body. They also discussed problems. Peter Winter, from Manchester Science Enterprise Centre, said: "We find that science and technology curricula are already pretty crowded, with students typically taking over 25 hours of classes a week. It is hard for departments to find room to include modules on enterprise." Delegates also pointed out that more staff are needed to teach enterprise to science and technology students.

Dr Robert Handscombe, Director of the White Rose Centre for Enterprise in Sheffield, said, "The Science Enterprise Centres have some excellent academic staff who are developing enterprise courses, and very valuable inputs from senior business people with a wealth of experience, but there just aren't enough qualified people with the skills available to teach enterprise. We would also really like to encourage "near peers" to come and teach - entrepreneurs close in age to our students, and therefore particularly able to inspire them. But we realise that they probably can't afford to give up the time to come, and we probably can't afford to pay the market rate."

Professor Colin Howard from the Royal Veterinary College in London agreed. He is Vice-Principal for Research and the Professor of Microbiology at the College, but has also set up the College's Veterinary Enterprise Centre for Technology, Opportunity and Resource. "Student vets and medics (along with student dentists and architects) are the very people who are going to go off and work in, or set up, small and medium-sized enterprises," he said. "But they get zero training in enterprise and the nuts and bolts of starting or running such a business."

He added, "There is a dearth of people to teach these skills or to act as role models for enterprise and innovation - for example, there is a general shortage of people equipped to act as the CEOs of spin-off biomedical or animal health companies."

The workshop was attended by delegates from the UK Science Enterprise Centres. These Centres, which now involve more than 50 universities, were set up in 2000 with government funding to help sponsor the commercialisation of science and technology. Many of them are developing and piloting new enterprise education programmes for science and technology students at both undergraduate and graduate level. .

This workshop - which coincided with one of the SECs' regular quarterly meetings - was organised by the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), which brings together staff from the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on issues relating to competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship in the UK. CMI organises a workshop on these subjects at every quarterly meeting of the SECs - topics so far have included intellectual property, business plan competitions and copyright and e-learning.

Speakers at this week's event included Christina Hartshorn from the University of Durham Foundation for Small and Medium Enterprise Development. She told delegates about an elective "Biology Enterprise" module the Foundation has developed in conjunction with the School of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. It has been offered for the first time this academic year to final-year undergraduates on biological and biomedical science courses.

"If we want students to become entrepreneurs, or behave more entrepreneurially, we need to look at what actually happens in the life-world of the entrepreneur, and how they learn," Hartshorn argued. Thus the course was designed so that students worked in small groups - as though they were in a small company. The students had to work out ways of overcoming conflicts about competing ideas - much in the way they might have to reconcile differences between members of their staff. And they had complete responsibility for their task (to do market research and come up with a viable business plan for a bioscience business) - as they would for a company they owned.

Hartshorn says they are tackling the shortage of qualified staff by training staff at the School to take over parts of the course as it develops. Says Hartshorn, "I'm not suggesting Professors of Biology should teach courses on finance or marketing for small business - you need specialist input for that. But six of their staff have been learning about mentoring the groups of students. We led the mentoring groups this year, next year they will lead them, with our support, and as the number of students on the course expands, we will train up more staff to do the same."

Other speakers included Lesley Hetherington, a lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde, who told delegates about the work she has done on developing personal effectiveness skills for potential entrepreneurs. "The successful attributes of an entrepreneur," she said, "are that they have a big vision, and the ability to transform that vision into action. But budding entrepreneurs need to ask themselves questions about whether their idea is actually realistic.

"You can't give people a magic wand," she added, "but you can give them tools to encourage them to ask themselves more effective questions."

There were also speakers from Cambridge and MIT. Dr David Good, Director of CMI's Undergraduate Education programme at Cambridge, talked about the value of Open Source materials in educational technology, which he described as "infrastructure for innovation".

And Professor Michael Scott Morton, Co-Director of CMI and Professor of Management at the MIT business school, the Sloan School, told delegates about MIT's entrepreneurship initiatives, including its E-Lab course. This requires science and management graduate students to spend one day a week with high-tech start-up companies to "solve a problem which is keeping the CEO awake at night", and which has become increasingly popular both with students and companies.

Both he and Anthony Ives, programme manager at the MIT Entrepreneurship Centre revealed that many of MIT's enterprise programmes are initiated by students. "We help support events at which students invite local entrepreneurs to come and talk," said Ives. "And once students know that we will pay for coke and pizza, and help them find speakers, they are very keen to set up events." Meanwhile Professor Scott Morton added that MIT's highly successful business plan competition was originally the brainchild of three students at the Sloan School who asked their professor to judge their draft business plans. "He offered them a $500 prize," revealed Scott Morton. "And 13 years later, we have 135 teams competing for $50,000 of funding to start up their companies."