Academics

Rochester Tapped for Entrepreneurism

ENTREPRENEURS: Joshua Shapiro ’05 and Ankur Pansari ’04 talk about their experience in founding the software company Treosoft after the announcement of Rochester’s selection by the Kauffman Foundation. The two have developed a Web-based system, called Campus Club Connection, designed for student groups at colleges and universities to better organize and promote their activities.

The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well at the University and earning national recognition.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation selected Rochester as one of eight institutions across the country—and the only one in the Northeast—to receive a multiyear grant to make entrepreneurship education an integral ingredient of academic activity.

The foundation awarded the University $3.5 million, which, with matching funds, will be part of a $10.5 million program over the next five years to embed entrepreneurship into programs across the disciplines and schools.

This initiative includes the creation of a University Center for Entrepreneurship to identify new partnerships with alumni, local businesses, and nonprofit organizations, to encourage faculty to design coursework and programs, and to advance research into “best practices” in entrepreneurship education.

“Great entrepreneurs are laced into the history of our University—in technology, the sciences, medicine and nursing, the arts—and that entrepreneurial spirit continues strongly today on campus,” said President Jackson. “It is broadly evident across the disciplines, manifesting itself among our faculty and students in many different, powerful ways.

“The support of the Kauffman Foundation will have a transforming effect on our ability to have all of our constituencies become even more entrepreneurial than they are right now,” he added.

Kauffman grants also went to Washington University in St. Louis, Wake Forest University, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Howard University, and Florida International University in Miami.

(For more on Rochester’s plans for the initiative, see the President’s Message.)