University paves new path for entrepreneurs

CLEMSON, S.C. — In years past, when Clemson University engineering majors completed their senior design projects, the ideas they had crafted or products they had worked to create often disappeared.

The students received a grade, graduated and moved on to a career in an engineering field.

And those ideas? They never turned into businesses.

Now a team of professors is working to change that — to foster an entrepreneurial spirit among all Clemson students — and it's starting with a pilot program in the College of Engineering and Science.

In 2013-14, a three-person team of bio-engineering majors created a wrist brace designed to help people plagued by tremors, including Parkinson's disease.

The brace was designed to absorb and diffuse the impact of tremors to give patients a steady hand and enable them to perform daily activities, said Elliott Mappus, now a graduate student who was part of the original team.

The low-profile brace provides resistance to the muscles contracting and opposes it with a mechanical force, he said.

The team, which calls itself Neuro Tek, built a prototype and tested it in a laborabory.

The students turned in their project and moved on. But Mappus said he decided to present his idea to an extracurricular gathering of students and investors called the Design and Entrepreneurship Network that started in the fall.

From there, the idea took off.

The students received a $5,000 grant from VentureWell, a nonprofit that seeks to foster innovation among university students, and are working to finalize their design as they seek investor financing, said Justin Shaw, one of the team members.

When the team started the project, they just wanted an 'A' in the class, said Megan Casco, a team member and now a Clemson graduate student.

They were engineers, not entrepreneurs, and the business side of the idea was scary, she said.

"Now that I've actually gone through it, I understand it," Casco said. "I see how important it is. It's not as bad and scary as I thought it was."

A new class

Clemson wants to make the business side of innovation less scary for students like Casco, so it's creating a new entry-level entrepreneurship course that all engineering students can take beginning in fall 2015.

Within five years, Clemson hopes to offer the freshman-level course to students in all majors, said Robert McCormick, interim dean of the College of Business and Behavioral Science.

"The plan is to take entrepreneurial components throughout the entire curriculum," he said. "Our first big step to take it outside of the business school is in the College of Engineering."

Learning the basics of entrepreneurship today is as important as learning to read, write and do math, he said.

Entrepreneur programs in higher education used to reside strictly in the business schools, but in the past two decades more and more universities realized the lost potential that came from isolating entrepreneurial education.

Clemson was at the forefront of the shift in this entrepreneurial mindset. The Arthur M. Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership was founded in 1999 as a resource that all Clemson students could access.

Though the Spiro Institute resides in the business school, it already reaches across all schools at Clemson, McCormick said.

A new pathway

As faculty at Clemson sought to make these changes, the College of Engineering was selected as one of 25 schools to participate in a two-year Pathways to Innovation program run through Stanford University.

Pathways allows schools to assess their current programs and collaborate on strategies to improve.

"To have a high impact on society, I feel strongly that design, entrepreneurship and commercialization must play a central role in our university's focus on the future," the College of Engineering's dean, Anand Gramopadhye, said in a statement. "The Pathways program will help make entrepreneurship part of the university's DNA."

John DesJardins, an associate bioengineering professor and a co-leader in the Pathways initiative, said students in the engineering school need to be taught that turning their ideas into businesses is possible.

"We're really great at making technologies, but we just haven't had a good, strong track record of translating those into companies," DesJardins said.

They're not trying to turn all engineering majors into business owners, he said. But they do want engineering students to think about how useful the technologies they're building could be to consumers.

The Spiro Institute has helped launch nearly 40 businesses statewide, is involved in multiple business pitch competitions on and off campus and has 230 students from all Clemson colleges who participate in forums called Innovation Design and Entrepreneurship Among Students where they present and critique business ideas, said Greg Pickett, associate dean of the College of Business and Behavioral Science.

Picket said the institute actively seeks engineering majors to help them with their ideas.

This Pathways program is a way to deepen the relationship between the Spiro Institute, the business college and the engineering college, McCormick said.

Clemson is building a new pathway that should pave the way for more of those ideas, like the Tremless wrist brace, to turn into more than an idea, DesJardins said.

"Hopefully, it will create a bunch of new opportunities for our students," he said.

Those new technologies, which could solve real problems, have been set aside unless students took initiative or stumbled upon how to turn them into businesses, Casco said.

"Most of them are just sitting there collecting dust in a cabinet somewhere," she said.