Couple awards $5 million gift to UO.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

The president of a Portland sportswear company and his wife are donating $5 million to the University of Oregon to help it expand programs in entrepreneurship and product design.

The gift from Tim and Mary Boyle was announced Friday in Portland. The donation includes $3.5 million to expand a student business competition, the New Venture Champ- ionship; attract more Asian universities to the event; and boost event marketing.

The remaining $1.5 million will go to the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts to launch a multi-disciplinary program in product design and materials study.

Tim Boyle, a UO graduate, is the president and chief executive officer of Columbia Sportswear, an outdoor clothing and equipment company based in Portland. The company, which went public in 1998, has expanded in recent years and in 2004 reported overall sales of $1.1 billion.

The New Venture Championship, run by the UO's Lundquist College of Business, is a contest in which students present business plans to panels of judges drawn from the corporate and academic world. The plans are for launching real products and services. More than half the plans presented in past competitions have resulted in business start-ups.

Randy Swangard, managing director of the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship, said the Boyles' gift will allow the college to reach its goal of attracting half the contest entrants from Asian countries, aiding both the business college's Engaging China Initiative and the university's East Asia Initiative. The initiatives are meant to position the UO as a key resource on east Asia for Oregon businesses, government officials and cultural organizations.

With the gift, the UO will be able to increase prize money for the New Venture Championship to $100,000 from the current $70,000 and will boost marketing for the competition. The UO started the contest in 1992 with three teams competing for $300 in prizes; it has since become one of the top three student business competitions in the country.

A previous gift from the Boyles helped expand the program and bring in advertising students from the UO School of Journalism and Communication to market the event. The new gift will bolster that relationship.

The product design program will combine courses in humanities, business, art and architecture with courses in product design. It will be a collaboration between the architecture school's department of art and interior architecture programs.

"Our original gift to support the New Venture Championship was a great investment," said Boyle, who earned a journalism degree from the UO in 1971. "This new gift is about leveraging that success to expand the NVC and promote further awareness of the event by combining the talents in the business college and journalism school."

The Boyles' gift will go toward the UO's $600 million fundraising campaign. Tim Boyle is vice chairman of the campaign.