Inspiring Innovation

At a time when 20-somethings are launching billion-dollar companies, entrepreneurship is as hip among today’s youth as online networking. A new generation of out-of-the-box thinkers is looking to their college education to help them turn big ideas into start-up successes.

“Entrepreneurship is the fastest growing curriculum in higher education across the nation,” says Linda Morris, College of Business and Economics faculty member. “It’s a real interest among today’s students, and the University of Idaho has taken the lead in offering an innovative program for this new generation of entrepreneurs.”

Morris is director of University of Idaho’s Vandal Innovation and Enterprise Works (VIEW), a university-wide program designed to harness and develop students’ entrepreneurial spirit through business planning courses, annual competitions, synergistic partnerships, and an entrepreneurship certificate program.

Just two years in the making, the popular program has quickly proven to be a valuable enhancement to any major’s education and has already given wings to some students’ business ideas. The founders of GoSleepGo.com, an online travel guide, got their start as winners of the 2007 VIEW Business Plan Competition, where they grabbed the attention of an attending venture capitalist. Other competition participants also credit the program for their post-college success.

“The VIEW competition condensed almost 10 years of business experience into a six-month long competition and helped me understand almost every aspect of the start-up process,” says Brett Josephson, 2007 graduate, and now major player in technology start-up LUNARR, based in Portland, Oregon.

The VIEW program also aims to help students understand how to move new products and processes to the marketplace. VIEW works closely with senior design courses and professors and collaborates with the university’s Office of Technology Transfer (OTT). Students act as business planning consultants to help license and commercialize technologies and products that are developed in university laboratories.

“The university draws more than $100 million for research annually,” Morris says. “VIEW students can help take research discoveries off the shelf and into the marketplace, which could have a huge economic impact on the university and the state of Idaho.”