On a mild day in mid-July, four advocates for entrepreneurship from England’s University of Warwick volunteered to be the first to present their team project, illustrating their deep passion for realizing what they were calling the “Warwick Enterprise Pathway.”
The visitors were taking part in a two-week experience, called the Faculty Fellows Program, in which the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) hosts representatives from universities across the globe to come and refine entrepreneurship initiatives for their home campuses, while also soaking up all that is Silicon Valley.
The Faculty Fellows Program includes opportunities for visiting teams to get feedback from entrepreneurship educators at Stanford affiliated with STVP. And the minute Team Warwick finished its presentation, Trevor Loy, who co-teaches the course “Entrepreneurial Management & Finance,” pointed out that the term “enterprise” is synonymous with “large business” in Silicon Valley — so, not exactly entrepreneurial.
Because “enterprise” is the correct word in England, Warwick’s team stuck with it. But the verbal quibble was proof that STVP’s instructors were there to listen closely to every word and identify opportunities for all of the teams to hone their projects. This type of feedback was a big reason that the team — representing the Warwick Enterprise Partnership — came to Stanford.
Like the other teams from Chile, Finland, Lithuania, Sweden and Uruguay, Warwick’s arrived with four members: Nigel Sykes, a teaching fellow in the Enterprise and Innovation Group at Warwick’s business school; Kevin Marks, head of the university’s technology-commercialization office; Rachel Davis, from Warwick’s Student Careers and Skills office; and Laura Downey York, a research project manager at the university.
As they described it, the overall goals of the “pathway” they envisioned were to ensure that all students be introduced to the concept of entrepreneurship and be able to articulate either how they are entrepreneurial or how they can develop their entrepreneurial skills. Another goal was to enable all members of Warwick’s community to access what they need and when they need it, regardless of where they are in their entrepreneurial journey.
A final goal was to ensure that the entrepreneurial activity at Warwick is visible and interactive — physically and online — in order to inspire others and engage external stakeholders and partners. To that end, longtime STVP faculty member Tom Kosnik, a consulting professor in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering, encouraged the team to see if it could secure any financial support from Jaguar Land Rover, which is helping fund the creation of a center for automotive innovation at Warwick.
But what really got Kosnik’s attention wasn’t the team’s witty project title — “Warwick Enterprise (Un)Ltd.” — but the three words that appeared below it: “Energy Commitment Altruism.”
‘Why are you here?’
Sitting outside on a third-floor terrace the day after opening presentations, the British team members were eager to hear Kosnik’s thoughts on their presentation. Throughout, Sykes insisted that Warwick’s students should be at the center of their “enterprise” plan. And because of his 30-plus years of teaching at Stanford and Harvard before that, Kosnik was considered the best coach for teams with an emphasis on academics.
At one point during the afternoon session, Kosnik asked each team member to answer a very basic question: “Why are you here?” They took turns, going around the table, beginning with York. Like others on her team, she had direct experience as an entrepreneur, having launched an online platform with her husband that provides teaching and learning materials for students studying government and politics in the U.K.
“I’m here because I think it’s really important to bring research and our academic colleagues into the enterprise discussion,” York said. “I think that enterprising ability and enterprising behavior and skills in our students is the future of student development and research development at our university.”
“I really want all students to understand and be able to articulate how they are enterprising,” said Davis, who heads student development in Warwick’s Student Careers and Skills office. “We should all have the opportunity to engage in that, particularly our students.”
In the days ahead, the Faculty Fellow teams took time to tour the Stanford campus and meet with students involved in STVP offerings such as the Mayfield Fellows Program and Accel Innovation Scholars program. The teams also learned more about Stanford’s approach to entrepreneurship education through a presentation by Prof. Tom Byers, STVP’s faculty co-director, while exercising their creative instincts in workshops led by STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig and Stanford lecturers Anne Fletcher and Aleta Hayes.
Warwick’s Nigel Sykes at a creativity workshop at Stanford.
One of the activities the teams liked most, it turns out, was the day spent visiting startups and accelerators near Stanford and in San Francisco. They dropped by StartX, an accelerator next to campus for Stanford-affiliated entrepreneurs, and then drove up to the San Francisco offices of NovoEd, an innovator in the world of massive open online courses (MOOCs) that began at the university.
‘Where do we want to get to?’
The field trip allowed the teams to see the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem beyond Stanford, which then helped them as they iterated on their projects during dedicated time slots throughout the two weeks when teams could work independently. “To me, that has been the most useful thing,” said Richard Groves, an enterprise-research development officer in Davis’ office who joined Warwick’s team the second week, “to have that breathing space to actually ask, ‘Where are we, where do we want to get to, and what needs to happen in the next six months?’”
On July 25, they outlined just that. It was the last day of the Faculty Fellows visit, and this time, Warwick’s evangelists for enterprise went second — after the team from Uruguay. As Sykes put it, the order of events upon returning to Warwick would start with raising awareness and winning support across the university — through recruitment into the Warwick Enterprise Partnership and engagement with student groups — followed by establishing a common language and surveying the landscape of resources and ideas.
Prior to final presentations, STVP’s Global Programs Manager Rebecca Edwards, who developed and organized the Faculty Fellows experience, asked each of the teams what would be the first email they would send, or the first meeting they would have, when they returned home. The question was an exercise in thinking tactically about next steps.
For the Warwick Enterprise Partnership, it would be to begin preparing for an “enterprise festival” planned for the first month of the new school year. The event would span several days and kickstart the effort in celebratory fashion, in hopes of encouraging students and the rest of the Warwick community to get involved.
“We know this is going to take a long time to change the culture of an institution,” Groves said. “But we want to make a big noise in the next half year and get as many students and staff involved as soon as we can.”
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Interested in becoming a Faculty Fellow? Learn more and watch a short video on how much previous participants enjoyed the experience.
