The Department of Business at Kettering University recently welcomed entrepreneur Art DeMonte to the faculty, implemented a new entrepreneurship minor and continues encouraging students to take BUSN-572 Innovation and New Ventures. 

Kettering officials say it all harkens back to the skunk works -- the legendary organization within Lockheed Aircraft Corp. during World War II that led to rapid technological advancement.

Skunk Works is an example of intrapreneurship -- the practice of applying entrepreneurial skills and approaches within an established organization by employees who basically operate within this framework like entrepreneurs.

So how does this concept apply to Kettering University in Flint?

Since 2006, Massoud Tavakoli, professor of mechanical engineering, Andy Borchers, associate professor of business and information systems and interim department head, and Bill Riffe, professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering, have worked to develop entrepreneurship opportunities and academic programming at Kettering.

In 2006 and again in 2007, the team of professors received a grant in each year for $50,000 from the Kern Family Foundation through the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network, which supported the development of an introductory class called BUSN 572, Innovation and New Ventures, and the Kettering Entrepreneur Society (www.kesociety.com). This student-led organization sponsors business plan competitions, provides support services and other activities in an effort to promote an entrepreneurial culture at Kettering based on innovation. Additionally, KES helped spawn several new student-owned businesses based in Flint.

For the state of Michigan and city of Flint, which currently has an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent, new, innovative businesses are necessary to insure the economic potential and outlook of this part of the country.

Today, entrepreneurship studies at Kettering also focus on intrapreneurship, which helps provide students a comprehensive understanding of how innovative ideas are spurred and supported internally by parent companies.

Art DeMonte, who joined Kettering in July as the McDonald Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship, is an accomplished entrepreneur who will teach BUSN 572.

DeMonte’s background in entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial activities is extensive: he came to Michigan about nine years ago to help launch eChemicals, an internet-enabled chemical distributor in Ann Arbor, helped create new business models at Dow Chemical, and later became the executive director of the Great Lakes Entrepreneur’s Quest, which operates a statewide business plan competition and is a powerful engine for the formation of new, high-growth companies.

“At Kettering, students show great interest in developing new, innovative entrepreneurial opportunities that they can implement in the near-term,” DeMonte said. “While large research universities generate a lot of high potential technology, it often takes many years to commercialize the idea into a business depending on its complexity. But given Kettering’s cooperative education program, students can realistically look to the near future to implement their ideas and build a business, which is a big advantage.”

Riffe, who taught creativity at Kettering for 15 years, became involved in the Kern Family Foundation grant-funded project because he views the establishment of entrepreneurial studies at Kettering not as a luxury but rather as a necessity. Now the group of professors expects to focus on intrapreneurship as yet another way to enhance the cooperative education experience of students and provide a critical resource for cooperative education partners.

Kettering also recently established a new minor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
 
The minor requires students to complete four courses: the popular Innovations and New Ventures (BUSN572), Entrepreneurial Finance (FINC415), Business Law (BUSN453) and one of three business minor classes (ACC315, MRKT570, or MGMT350). 

Students can combine the Entrepreneurship and Innovation minor with a Business minor and complete both in just six courses. 

Student interest in entrepreneurship is growing rapidly on campus. By the end of 2008 more than 100 students will have completed Innovations and New Ventures. 
 
To learn more about this important new minor, contact the Department of Business via email at business@kettering.edu or call (810) 762-7983.

“We hope to make entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial studies part of the Kettering educational culture,” he said. “Bringing Art in, increasing our marketing efforts of the KES, the BUSN 572 course and its ties to our corporate sponsors, business plan competitions and other resources we’ve developed thanks to the Kern grants make the study of entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial efforts more intriguing to students and to our corporate partners,” he added.

Riffe hopes to promote intrapreneurship to Kettering corporate partners by taking business potentials and transforming them into commercial opportunities.

“Because the institution has an exceptional history with cooperative education, Kettering students are uniquely positioned to do this since they’re already part of the corporate partner’s enterprise,” he said.

Riffe titled this activity “patent commercialization,” which involves taking a corporate partner’s unused intellectual property and develop a program to convert it to a saleable product or valuable process. The payoff for corporate partners is two-fold: first, it provides companies access to selected Kettering faculty who work closely with student teams to develop projects to a realistic conclusion; and second, this process provides companies with employees who can use this experience and duplicate it for other projects within a company.

Thus far, student teams have worked on two patents from Delphi. Specifically, the student teams helped the company develop the technical and business plans for each patent. Based on the excitement expressed by Delphi representatives regarding the high-quality efforts of student teams, the company has offered additional patents for students to examine and plan for commercialization.

“This is just another enhancement to our co-op program,” Riffe said. “Eventually, we would like to expand this program to include non-intellectual property projects. The more experience our students obtain through this effort, the more valuable they become as employees to our corporate partners."