How the City of Albuquerque Grows Entrepreneurial Thinking From the Inside Out
January 25, 2022
Many cities have worked to attract entrepreneurs over the past decade. Albuquerque, New Mexico, is among them—but in an innovative twist, the fast-growing Southwestern city also worked to foster an entrepreneurial mindset from the inside out. City leaders aren’t looking for municipal employees to start their own businesses. Instead, they’re following the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative’s definition of entrepreneurship as the self-director pursuit of opportunities to create value for others. Here’s the story of how…
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College Success Reimagined: A Unique Approach in Wyoming
January 12, 2022
First-year college students often take some version of a success course designed to ease their transition into campus experiences. At Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the freshman success course used to be a series of basic how-to lessons on things like using the library. But when the college decided to move to a guided pathways model, it seized the opportunity for a revolutionary update to the one class that nearly all incoming…
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Applying an Entrepreneurial Mindset to a Tough Economic Reality
December 6, 2021
Sometimes the students in Assistant Professor James Myers’ Introduction to Entrepreneurship course balk when he assigns them to interview entrepreneurial thinkers in their lives. “Students say, ‘I’m running out of people to talk to!’” said Myers, an Assistant Professor in the business department at Pasco-Hernando State College in west-central Florida. He replies that they haven’t exhausted the supply—they’re just looking in the wrong places. “You have to go outside your immediate social circle,” he…
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Tackling Social Injustice Through an Entrepreneurial Mindset
October 27, 2021
The opportunities and resources for Black entrepreneurs and minority-led startups often presuppose a skill set that people who grew up in poverty don’t have. “A lot of the circles of support are for middle-class Black people,” explained Pastor Myron Pierce. Pierce serves as the pastor of the Mission Church in North Omaha, Nebraska. “There’s a language you have to speak, systems and structures and culture you need to know about—and that makes it hard…
Read morePlanting Seeds of Entrepreneurial Thinking—With a Homegrown Twist
October 13, 2021
One of the preeminent entrepreneurial thinkers in higher education lives and works in an unlikely place: a metro area of 246,000 residents just a couple of hours south of the Canadian border. Bree Langemo, lawyer and educator, exemplifies ELI’s definition of entrepreneurship. That is the self-directed pursuit of opportunities to create value for others, whatever the field or location. Langemo directs the Entrepreneurship Center at Concordia College’s Offutt School of Business in Moorhead, Minnesota.…
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A Managerial vs. Entrepreneurial Approach to Leadership
August 31, 2021
You might have seen the recent Inside Higher Ed article published in March of 2021 titled “Colleges a ‘Juicy Target” for Cyberextortion.” As if mask mandates (or lack thereof), vaccination hesitancy, the Delta Variant, and all the other disruptions that we’ve seen over the last 18 months aren’t enough, now cybercriminals have our schools in their crosshairs. And it’s not just higher ed institutions that are at risk. Someone could soon find my 5-year-old niece’s…
Read moreShaping Schools’ Futures Through an Entrepreneurial Mindset
August 13, 2021
Dr. Jacob Pittroff teaches at two historic schools in eastern Missouri, both of which face similar recruitment challenges—and both of which have an entrepreneurial mindset that starts at the top. Christian Brothers College High School (CBC), founded in 1850, is an all-male, Catholic college preparatory high school with more than 800 students. A few miles to the north lies the main campus of Lindenwood University, founded in 1827. Lindenwood has nearly 7,400 undergraduate and…
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How Do You Find ‘Your’ Problem to Solve?
July 19, 2021
Albert Edward Foreman, a humble clergyman who cannot read or write, has spent 16 years in a comfortable position at his local church when we meet him in the opening lines of the short story The Verger by W. Somerset Maugham. But there’s a shakeup in his peaceful world. The parish comes under new management, and Foreman is fired from his job because of his illiteracy. On his walk home, the disheartened former verger accidentally…
Read moreApplying an Entrepreneurial Approach in Our Daily Lives
June 28, 2021
The Ice House program takes its name from an everyday problem facing the residents of Mississippi: summer heat. Today, getting ice is as easy as walking over to the dispenser in our kitchens. In the early 1900s though, customers made frequent trips to their local ice houses to buy ice in 25- or 50-pound blocks. Solving the problem of keeping food cold during sweltering Southern summers didn’t take a degree in rocket science—or much formal…
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