More and more young people with dreams of making it big are looking up to business innovators these days instead of rock stars and athletes – and Ottawa’s educators know it well.
by Adam Feibel, Ottawa Business Journal
Due in part to sexed-up media coverage of big startup successes, a pool of talented but frustrated graduates stuck in a difficult job market and shifting attitudes about what it means to start a business venture, entrepreneurs have become a new breed of celebrity.
As U.S.-based consultant Timothy Karunaratne succinctly said in a recent New York Times interview, “I think it’s a fair statement to say most people would rather be Mark Zuckerberg than Will Smith.”
In fact, the aspiring entrepreneur in Canada isn’t that different from an aspiring NHLer, says Stephen Daze, entrepreneur-in-residence at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, explaining the field’s newfound celebrity status just the way you’d expect from a true Canadian.
A number of factors contribute to this country’s high production of great hockey players, “not the least of which is they’re revered,” he says. “Kids grow up with posters of hockey players on their bedroom walls, they hear them talked about and they read about them in the newspaper.
“We’re certainly not all the way there yet, but we’re starting to see these poster children of entrepreneurism. Ten years ago, 20 years ago, you probably couldn’t get a high school or university student to name entrepreneurs, but today they could.”
Students with an idea and a business plan have more resources than ever at Ottawa’s universities. Recently, the University of Ottawa launched the Entrepreneurship Hub to expand experiential learning among its students, and in September, Carleton University alumnus Wes Nicol donated $10 million to his alma mater to help fund a second building for the Sprott School of Business.
Collaborative effort
Tony Bailetti, a Carleton professor and head of several of the university’s entrepreneurial programs, says the two universities are also working with Algonquin College and La Cité collégiale on a collaborative entrepreneurship project for post-secondary students citywide.
Mr. Bailetti said it will draw from each school’s unique strengths to deliver a four-tier system that includes an ecosystem, incubators and accelerators, knowledge development programs and events.
By working together on the project, the schools will be “institutionalizing something that’s been happening for years,” he says.
“It’s hard for us to segment around post-secondary institutions. That doesn’t make any sense to the kids. They will go to wherever makes sense for their companies,” says Mr. Bailetti. “If we don’t do it, the kids would do it for us.”
Launched over the summer and led by Luc Lalande, the former director of Carleton University’s Innovation Transfer Office, the uOttawa’s Entrepreneurship Hub breaks from the popular high-tech startup model due to its more diverse and holistic definition of entrepreneurship itself, Mr. Lalande explains.
Resembling the models adopted by business schools at U.S. institutions such as Babson College and Princeton University, the E-Hub aims to help students develop an “entrepreneurial mindset” to help them land jobs, advance in their careers or start their own companies. It’s a view that places less emphasis on startups in order to open up other options such as freelance, family enterprise, social entrepreneurship or buying an existing company, says Mr. Lalande.
He says students, however wide-eyed and ambitious, usually can’t just start a successful venture with little to no experience.
“A lot of students, frankly, they’re not ready to start a business right out of school,” he says, citing the high rate of startups that fold within the first one or two years, once the funding dries up.
Paid internships
The E-Hub will instead place students in part-time paid internships, about 10 hours a week, at an existing small business. The idea is they’ll gain first-hand experience of how companies work and sharpen their sights for future opportunities.
The program is open to all students at the university, not just those at Telfer.
“The schools of businesses are not the only source of entrepreneurial students,” says Mr. Lalande.
Carleton, which has long been a central figure in Ottawa’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, continues to expand in size and scope. Sprott offers an undergraduate specialization in entrepreneurship within its bachelor of commerce program, but students from all faculties can enrol in entrepreneurship as their minor.
Carleton also houses the unique technology innovation management master’s program, led by Mr. Bailetti. The TIM program teaches the theory and practice of launching a tech company and growing an existing one, with the goal of creating wealth at the early stages of a business opportunity. Earlier this year, the program was named a runner-up for the Entrepreneurial Effect Award by Startup Canada.
“These students come together in the same classes and exchange ideas, so it’s a much richer pool of potential innovations and ideas,” says Jerry Tomberlin, Sprott’s dean.
That pool is expected to grow in the next few years. The new Sprott building will mean an additional 500 to 600 students, says Mr. Tomberlin, and “a number of new programs that are currently under discussion.” Sprott’s enrolment currently hovers just above 2,000 students.
Startup-focused vision
Carleton has also emphasized experience-based learning, although with a more startup-focused vision than that of uOttawa.
A good school, Mr. Bailetti says, tells students to build a business plan right away in year one, rather than waiting until fourth year. That gives them the opportunity to try and fail several times before they even graduate, he says.
“You can watch the apples fall from trees as much as you want, but you’ll never invent the law of gravity that way,” says Mr. Bailetti.
“Entrepreneurship is like sex,” he adds, showing a fondness for analogies. “I can give you 100 books about it … but you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to make your mistakes, and you’ve got to do it better.”
Mr. Bailetti has run Lead to Win, one of the most recognized incubator programs in Ottawa, since 2002, and Carleton Entrepreneurs, a resource and support system, since 2012.
Meanwhile, uOttawa runs Startup Garage, a 90-day boot camp designed for first-timers “who don’t necessarily have a business background,” says Catherine Geci, the program’s lead organizer. Companies that begin there will often move on to Lead to Win.
Startup Garage will be branching out in its 2015 edition, since a new investment from the Ontario government’s Campus-Linked Accelerator program means it will be open to all applicants aged 18 to 29, rather than just Ottawa post-secondary students, Ms. Geci says.
Students themselves have recognized the demand for entrepreneurship resources. Croomer is a software startup that began in the 2013-14 school year in auOttawa course led by Mr. Daze and engineering professor Hanan Anis.
The idea was to put business and engineering students in the same room and see what they could come up with together. Ned Nadima and his teammates saw an opportunity in that notion itself: a software application that helps aspiring entrepreneurs find other partners.
Some people might have a good idea for a business, but lack the skills to bring it to life. Others have the technical skills, such as engineering or computer programming, but don’t have a unique idea or the know-how to turn it into a profitable business. Croomer acts as a matchmaker.
‘Demise of the secure job’
The Entrepreneurship Hub will implement the application later this semester, Mr. Lalande says. Students will be able to log in to find potential partners and the E-Hub will use it to find students with notable proficiency in a technical skill who can be placed into internships.
Croomer hopes the university will be one of many Canadian schools to carry the software.
“They’re all looking for something to help students with entrepreneurship,” says Mr. Nadima, a recent uOttawa graduate and one of the five students and recent grads behind Croomer. “The biggest challenge universities are facing right now is to get (students) outside of the business or engineering schools to start thinking about entrepreneurship.”
They’ve also been in talks with Conestoga College in Kitchener, Dalhousie University and Winnipeg’s Red River College, according to Mr. Nadima. He saysone of the most significant issues is determining a revenue model that makes sense for the schools and the company.
Ottawa’s business educators say the programs and resources offered to students are extremely important to provide the experience needed to become successful as early as possible – especially due to “the demise of the secure job as previous generations knew it,” as Mr. Daze puts it.
“Nobody has job security, period. You’re probably more secure if you’ve created your own opportunity because you have the ability to create your own destiny,” he says.
It’s also important for kick-starting the economy, educators say.
“It’s our realization as business schools that we have a role to play in stimulating the creation of wealth through startups,” says Mr. Tomberlin.
The upcoming four-way collaboration between Ottawa’s schools will be thesecond such joint project in the last few years, after the Ottawa Young Entrepreneurs accelerator program launched in 2011. Though he doesn’tspecifically mention the new project, Mr. Tomberlin says these kinds of efforts need to keep happening.
“Post-secondary institutions in the city need to continue working closer together,” he says. “It’s good to have competition, but we provide a stronger ecosystem when we co-operate.”
