SDSU's Entrepreneurial Management Center celebrates 15 years of chasing dreams: Lone visionary founded center, created 'agents of change'. (Special Report Education).As for as Daryl Mitton knows, no other college business professor in the nation taught entrepreneurship classes as early as he did -- starting in 1970. Actually, the now-retired San Diego State University San Diego State University (SDSU), founded in 1897 as San Diego Normal School, is the largest and oldest higher education facility in the greater San Diego area (generally the City and County of San Diego), and is part of the California State University system. professor and founder of the university's Entrepreneurial Management Center urged students to chase their own ideas as early as 1968, when he joined the faculty. Without anyone knowing, he taught entrepreneurship during regular business classes. "I wanted to get it into their bones," said Mitton, 80. "That required a little bit different approach." He designed a series of exercises to move students out of comfort zones. Entrepreneurs are, after all, agents of change, he reasoned. So Mitton asked students to sit in a different chair at their next meal, scout out a new gasoline station, roll out of bed on the opposite side. In essence, he urged students to yank Yank steamship stoker vainly tries to climb the social ladder, then fails in attempt to avenge himself on society. [Am. Drama: O’Neill The Hairy Ape in Sobel, 339] See : Failure (jargon) yank off the blinders blind·er n. 1. blinders A pair of leather flaps attached to a horse's bridle to curtail side vision. Also called blinkers. 2. Something that serves to obscure clear perception and discernment. . "By the end of the semester, I didn't have the same class I started out with," Mitton said. In order to give entrepreneurship more clout in the world of academia and create a link between the university's MBA MBA abbr. Master of Business Administration Noun 1. MBA - a master's degree in business Master in Business, Master in Business Administration students and San Diego's growing business secior, Mitton founded the Entrepreneurial Management Center, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year. Small Business Success Magazine ranked SDSU's MBA program 10th in the nation among business schools for entrepreneurs in February 2001. And in U.S. News & WorldReport's 2003 edition of Best Graduate Schools, the magazine listed SDSU SDSU San Diego State University SDSU South Dakota State University SDSU Standard Distribution Switching Unit SDSU Smds Dsu as one of the nation's top 20 graduate programs for entrepreneurship. * Leading The Way Around the nation, entrepreneurship wasn't considered an academic discipline in the early 1970s, when Mitton started teaching classes titled An Entrepreneur and Venture Management. All the while, Mitton -- who founded and operated Chemical Energy Co., a San Diego San Diego (săn dēā`gō), city (1990 pop. 1,110,549), seat of San Diego co., S Calif., on San Diego Bay; inc. 1850. San Diego includes the unincorporated communities of La Jolla and Spring Valley. Coronado is across the bay. aerospace firm specializing in chemical milling and explosive forming Explosive forming The shaping or modifying of metals by means of explosions. The explosives may be of either the detonating or deflagrating type. Explosive gas mixtures or stored gas at high pressure may also provide the motive power. -- watched San Diego morph morph 1 n. An allomorph. [From morpheme.] morph 2 n. into an entrepreneur's heaven. He took note of General Dynamics General Dynamics Corporation (NYSE: GD) is a defense conglomerate formed by mergers and divestitures, and as of 2006 it is the sixth largest defense contractor in the world[1]. The company has changed markedly in the post-Cold War era of defense consolidation. and General Atomics General Atomics is a nuclear physics and defense contractor headquartered in San Diego, California. Among other things, it is the manufacturer of the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). , which gave birth to scores of small- and medium-sized spin-off businesses in the region. The local economy started to shift from a heavy dependence on military and defense jobs to a more diversified base. A burgeoning biotech industry emerged. Law and accounting firms -- much-needed service providers for would-be companies -- abounded in San Diego. Venture capitalists looked to snap up early-stage startups. The time seemed perfect for SDSU to launch the Entrepreneurial Management Center, especially to Mitton, who started writing research papers on entrepreneurship in the 1940s. The San Diego business community wasn't all that fired up about an entrepreneurial program at SDSU, Mitton said. The faculty wasn't either. "It was me and that was it," he said. "I was teaching, writing papers, looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. money and going to conferences." Working with the university's administration in 1981, Mitton received the promise of $6,000 a year for five years from corporate sponsors. That seed money grew into a program that today runs on a $1.3 million annual endowment. * Growing Businesses Through the years, SDSU's MBA program and entrepreneurial center have acted as incubators for many successful businesses. Some examples include: A water-cooler conversation among students sparked the idea behind San Diego-based SupplyPro -- a Web-based supply dispensing system for offices and manufacturers. "We were out to see if this concept was a high-tech sledgehammer See Opteron. after a mosquito" or if it was marketable, said Dean Rosenberg, SupplyPro's vice president of technology and one of the company's co-founders. SDSU's College of Business Administration and Entrepreneurial Management Center provided "spiritual and tactical assistance." Administration and faculty offered unwavering support and linked SupplyPro founders with investment bankers and legal professionals, Rosenberg said. The company started in 1997. It now serves about 400 companies, of which 50 or so have earned spots on the Fortune 500 list. SupplyPro's target customers-employ at least 1,000 workers and report annual revenues of $50 million. The market potential for SupplyPro products and services stands at $4 billion. SupplyPro grew from 12 employees at the end of the first year to 80 today. Rosenberg declined to release financial information about the privately held company privately held company A firm whose shares are held within a relatively small circle of owners and are not traded publicly. , but he said revenue has increased at least 200 percent every year since SupplyPro's inception. Last year, SupplyPro bought out Vertex Technologies in Cincinnati. Vertex owned similar technology geared to heavy industrial applications, Rosenberg said. A recent SDSU College of Business Administration magazine outlined other local success stories. Pacific Ink, a San Diego County-based business, became the brainchild of Jaime Mautz, who finished the MBA program in 2000. Pacific Ink sells environmentally friendly Environmentally friendly, also referred to as nature friendly, is a term used to refer to goods and services considered to inflict minimal harm on the environment.[1] inkjet cartridges and refill refill noun A second allotment of a prescription agent obtained from a pharmacy, which is allowed by the original prescription verb Pharmacology To obtain more of a particular drug, after the initially prescribed amount of the agent has been used or kits online at discount prices. As of last year, Pacific Ink netted $10,000 in sales per week. Johann Verheem, who graduated from SDSU's MBA program in 1999, launched U.S. Application Technologies, Inc. of San Diego with $455,000 in venture capital. The company makes Appli-K pouches, a single-use tube for dispensing lotions and skin medications. The company later sold for $4 million. A group of four 20-somethings who graduated last semester from the SDSU MBA program hope to write the next success story. They recently launched Novaphage, a biotech company that uses a gene therapy process to prevent heart disease. Novaphage is looking for $4.3 million to fund two years of research and development, said Ernesto Ellis, the company's vice president of finance. SDSU created many opportunities for Novaphage, he said. Aside from rubbing elbows with San Diego's business elite through the Entrepreneurial Management Center, the Novaphage team tapped scientific work done by SDSU biology professor Roger Davis There have been several well-known people named Roger Davis, including:
"There's a lot of technology at (SDSU) that's developed for academic reasons, but it's basically there on the shelf," Ellis said. "It's not commercialized." * Among The Best The Entrepreneurial Management Center has earned a prominent reputation among an able set of national competitors, said Sanford Ehrlich, the center's executive director. It rivals programs at schools such as Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania (body, education) University of Pennsylvania - The home of ENIAC and Machiavelli. http://upenn.edu/. Address: Philadelphia, PA, USA. and the University of Texas at Austin “University of Texas” redirects here. For other system schools, see University of Texas System. The University of Texas at Austin (often referred to as The University of Texas, UT Austin, UT, or Texas , Ehrlich said. "It really is because of the support we receive from the local business community that participate in our program and help develop our curriculum," he said. Gary Cadenhead, associate director of the Herb Kelleher Herbert D. Kelleher (born March 12, 1931) is the co-founder, Chairman and former CEO of Southwest Airlines (based in the United States). Kelleher was born and raised in Haddon Heights, New Jersey. Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Texas, applauds Mitton's early work in entrepreneurship and SDSU's program. They are both well-known, Cadenhead said. By comparison, the University of Texas did not offer entrepreneurship courses until 1979, nearly a decade after Mitton started teaching the discipline at SDSU. Each year, Cadenhead brings a team of students to participate in SDSU's Entrepreneurial Management Center Venture Challenge, which is a business-plan competition. "It's a well-managed competition," Cadenhead said. "The teams that come are quite good. Judges are diverse." SDSU's entrepreneurship program evolved during the past 15 years, Ehrlich said. Some unexpected needs popped up. For example, he said, no one anticipated a trend toward social entrepreneurship Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. in which students startup nonprofit organizations such as San Diego-based Utility Consumers' Action Network. SDSU's Entrepreneurial Management Center now offers an active social entrepreneur internship internship /in·tern·ship/ (in´tern-ship) the position or term of service of an intern in a hospital. internship, n the course work or practicum conducted in a professional dental clinic. program, and the administration and faculty are developing a curriculum. Another area in which SDSU officials didn't anticipate as much growth was technology commercialization, or the early stage of assessing whether a technology can produce products for everyday life. SDSU gears its program toward building entrepreneurs with staying power, Ehrlich said. Typically, two to three new companies start up each year as a result of the program. The school doesn't track every business spawned by the MBA program or its Entrepreneurial Management Center, but Ehrlich believes "our statistics are probably better than the average for failures of startups." A few standouts -- even from the early days -- continue as a source of pride for SDSU. For example, Ralph Rubio, a 1978 graduate, came up with a fish taco recipe and started Carlsbad-based Rubio's Baja Grill. The company, which opened its first stand in Mission Bay in 1983 and has sold 45 million fish tacos since, went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange in May 1999. Fallbrook-based Color Spot Nursery, the nation's largest wholesale distributor of bedding plants, reported sales of about $200 million in 2001. Its founder, Jerry Halamuda, graduated from SDSU in 1972. Mitton remembers his former student James Sweeney, who graduated in 1969, as the quintessential quin·tes·sen·tial adj. Of, relating to, or having the nature of a quintessence; being the most typical: "Liszt was the quintessential romantic" Musical Heritage Review. entrepreneur. Sweeney founded Home Health Care of America Inc. in 1979. The company provided intravenous nutrition in patients' homes, pioneering a $4 billion industry. Baxter International Baxter International Inc. (NYSE: BAX), is a global healthcare company with 48,000 employees and 2006 sales of US$10.4 billion. Its headquarters is in Deerfield, Illinois. later bought the company for $586 million. Sweeney turned around and bought McGaw Labs for $206 million and tripled the firm's earnings in three years. He sold McGaw Labs to Miami-based IVAX IVAX Industrial Vax (Dec Computer) Corp. for $440 million. In 1999, Sweeney started working on his eighth start-up firm, San Diego-based CardioNet, which provides real-time heart monitoring services. |
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