Yesterday was a great day here at Belmont. As I mentioned the other day, our latest campus-based business opened for business.
Buzzy's Candy Store had an amazing opening, with revenues in one day that equal what some of our stores would be happy with in a month!! The girls behind this venture, Areej Rabie, Julia Cecere, and Mandy Strader, did an amazing job getting the store ready to open and building a "buzz" for their grand opening. There were lines to check out almost all day.
What is amazing is how many colleges and universities that you may have never heard of are doing really cool things in entrepreneurship education all around the world.
This is nothing new. Many of the best innovations in entrepreneurship education over the past three decades have come out of little known programs.
I could never have gotten our program to the point it is now at many of the larger, better known institutions. The bureaucracy and inertia at these schools makes program development a slow and sometimes painful process.
A post by Vivek Wadhwa at TechCrunch from last fall says that pedigree really does not matter for entrepreneurs -- it is what they get out of their education, not where it comes from that matters. He writes:
With my affiliations at three of the greatest universities in the world (Harvard, Berkeley, and Duke), I know I'm going to take a lot of flak for this piece. (Yes, I know that Berkeley and Duke aren't Ivy League -- but they are in the "elite" category). It's not that I haven't been trying to find the good news. I've done three big research projects on entrepreneurship. Each of these reached the same conclusion about education and entrepreneurship: What makes entrepreneurs successful is the education, not the school. It's the same in India and China. India's IITs and China's Fudan University (their "Ivy League" schools) don't hold any monopoly on graduating tech stars.
I find the same thing with our entrepreneurship students. Those who take advantage of all we offer them gain amazing momentum coming out of college.
Certainly, the two freshmen and the sophomore who took the initiative and opened Buzzy's are already improving their chances of success in their futures after they leave Belmont.
(Thanks to Bruce Schierstedt for passing the TechCrunch story along).
I remember being literally mesmerized by candy stores as a kid. I'd gawk at rows upon rows of colors and tell my folks to get me everything for my birthday.