Shared Data, Aligned Goals
This chapter is a part of the book “How to Build Thriving Start-up Ecosystems: Five Information Patterns for Success.”
When interviewing Program Leaders of several different centers at the University of Michigan — -Optimize, Techarb, Center for Entrepreneurship, Ross School of Business, the Zell Lurie Entrepreneurship Program, the School of Computer Science — -they did not necessarily have competing goals, but they all had slightly different goals and kept different information sets on the founders that went through their programs. Tracking of founders’ progress after graduation was done individual by individual, often based on who each Program Leader in the various different centers had in their LinkedIn networks. To effectively change the information ecosystem for entrepreneurship students, an important step is to look at the information infrastructure between Program Leaders within the university. Here ecological systems theory can be applied to design a more interconnected and dynamic framework.
In Donella Meadows’ book “Thinking in Systems” she spoke about leverage points, where small changes to the right part of a system can lead to large overall changes. One of the most important ways to change a system is through its goals and the metrics used to measure progress towards these goals. To increase the effectiveness of a university’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, the most powerful place to start is by creating a shared goal across all of its different entrepreneurship programs. A good goal is: Foster successful entrepreneurship at the university.
After Program Leaders decide on a shared goal, they need to make sure all programs are working towards this goal by utilizing shared metrics to measure progress. A good metric for this goal is number of businesses students and alumni have successfully started within five years of graduation.
When there is a shared goal and metric across programs it is a powerful force to get university entrepreneurship programs to work together. This collaborative effort between Program Leaders is the foundation to create the information maps for students to effectively navigate the school’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Choosing Metrics Wisely
In my interviews I noted several Program Leaders saw success as growth in interest for their programs measured by application or competitor numbers. This is a vanity metric. Large numbers of entrepreneurs that go through an entrepreneurship competition that have a low likelihood of success might make an individual program look popular but might ultimately hurt the ecosystem as a whole if that founder’s time could have been engaged in more useful activities.
Perhaps Peter could have used the hours he dedicated to refining his pitch to build out his website more, or have targeted meetings with customers. Getting student founders the right resources for their specific circumstances rather than pushing for using their own center’s resources will take a shift in the work and mindset of many Program Leaders but ultimately can lead to more successful businesses.
When aligning program goals to metrics CIDs should focus on success metrics over participation metrics. While it is still good to keep data on student participation numbers, this number is only important as in how it contributes to the overarching goal of the number of successful businesses students and alumni have started within five years of graduation. It is a small but important difference.
Sharing Data in Practice
To have all entrepreneurship programs work together towards successful student outcomes instead of simply student participation, they need to all be able to access and add to a shared database of information on student ventures.
For CIDs that are putting together a database of student businesses, some of the information they should collect:
- Student Name
- Student ID Number
- Major
- Company Name
- One Sentence company description
- Co-founders (Linked field to other student’s ID)
- Industry tags (Agriculture, Software, Fashion, Fintech, Health Tech, etc.)
- Year of Graduation
- Stage (Idea, Incorporated, prototype, funded, etc.)
- If funded, what stage (Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A, Series B)
- Number of employees
- What programs they have gone through (competitions, classes, incubators, etc.)
A Shift to Real World Results
A second important aspect of the success metric provided is that it measures number of successful ventures five years after graduation. This is intentional, as currently the vast majority of students stop working on their companies after graduation so programs often define success as participation in entrepreneurial activities during students’ attendance at the university.
However the real-world success of the ventures students create in school is increasingly important to them, as tuition has increased 175% for in-state schools over the last two decades and 134% for private universities (Wood). Students have a greater need to see clear returns on the investment they make by taking on the debt to go to a university. The ability to come out of a university with the skills and network to create a revenue generating business provides clear value to prospective students that are entering a hyper competitive world. This clear value add helps the university ecosystem as a whole.
