With much risk and no promise of return, entrepreneurship can be a tough sell for students, against contenders like accounting, finance and investment banking.
Wilfrid Laurier University has taken a big step in paving entrepreneurship as a more practical path for students, with a new slate of courses, starting this fall, that will streamline entrepreneurship as its own area of undergraduate study.
The initiative was designed through Laurier’s Schlegel Centre for Entrepreneurship. The centre opened in 2002 to support and strengthen entrepreneurship as a key pillar at the university.
The centre immediately recognized widespread interest in entrepreneurship among the student body, and not just among business students, even though it is housed in the School of Business & Economics.
Today, more than 2,500 students from various faculties are enrolled in courses with an entrepreneurial focus at Laurier. With the recent addition of courses, those numbers will continue to grow.
As the Schlegel Centre’s founding manager, Victoria Larke has been a key player since its earliest days, alongside director Steve Farlow. Larke’s business career started out in the health-care field, in which she worked for a boutique consulting firm. The advisory profession taught her how to design innovative solutions to address industry challenges. The skillset served her well upon taking a position with Industry Canada, managing the Student Connections program based at Laurier.
When the Schlegel Centre was announced, Larke jumped at the opportunity to get involved. As a Laurier business graduate herself, she loved the idea of helping to build out the future of entrepreneurship at Laurier.
Today, Larke continues to lead and manage activities at the Schlegel Centre. She is involved in everything from academics to the university’s LaunchPad program, based at the Communitech Hub, which helps students to create successful startups.
In an interview with Communitech News, Larke talked about the growing stature of entrepreneurship at Laurier, and the university’s evolving approach to it as an area of study.
Q – A new slate of entrepreneurship courses has just been rolled out for the upcoming semester. What is driving this change, and what does it signal about the role of entrepreneurship in today’s economy?
A – It’s really driven by students, and the level of interest that students have. It’s a great fit for the personality profile that comes to Laurier.
It’s the students, but also the fact that the economy is changing and the world is changing. The entrepreneurial skill set is becoming fundamental to how organizations operate.
Part of the goal of the entrepreneurship core is to provide students with the knowledge and skills that can be leveraged, whether they are going to work for a small, medium or large corporation, or whether they want to start their own venture down the road.
We want to equip students for the current economy and continue to have Laurier be a leading place for employers to go for great students who can get stuff done.
Q – BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis and the Ontario government recently provided $35 million to Laurier to build a management institute to support business and tech in the region. What changes will the institute bring to Laurier’s business program and beyond?
A – It’s building on our existing capabilities and building out Canada’s ability to grow high-tech businesses.
We’ve got a gap in Canada’s ability to build big businesses like BlackBerry. If you hear the recent interviews with Jim Balsillie, he talks about BlackBerry being the exception. It’s an anomaly.
Canadian companies don’t normally get to that level of magnitude. The Lazaridis Institute is going to be centred on filling that gap. (Expect a further announcement in early fall).
Q – How do you see the LaunchPad program evolving with the changing status of entrepreneurship in Laurier’s academic structure and institutions?
A – LaunchPad is complementary to all this.
With the introduction of the entrepreneurship courses, LaunchPad is now purely non-academic. With the courses, we’ll now be able to focus solely on students and alumni who want to start their businesses.
Much how we have Velocity at Waterloo, and DMZ at Ryerson, LaunchPad is that for Laurier.
Prior to the introduction of the entrepreneurship core, we were dealing with a lot of those educational issues as well. But now that that’s within the curriculum, we can focus solely on startups, and the bar to get in (to LaunchPad) will be much higher.
Q – At Communitech, we try to build and support a community of entrepreneurs in the region. How can Laurier and the University of Waterloo better collaborate to build a more cohesive ecosystem for startups?
A – I think its very well known within the community that Laurier is very collaborative and we are very open to ideas and sharing of information.
[We do] anything that we can do to help our students and expose them to learning opportunities, working opportunities, whoever that’s delivered by within our ecosystem. We’re happy to provide those opportunities to our students. I mean, that’s our mandate: to help our students be successful.
Certainly, we have a lot of respect and admiration for our colleagues at Velocity, and welcome any opportunities to collaborate.
We are going to be promoting their Alpha program to Laurier students, a) because it is a learning opportunity for Laurier students, but also because it will allow them to connect with UW students, and the complementary skill set and potential of that is very exciting.
Q – What are the next steps the Schlegel Centre will take to elevate Laurier and the region as a leader in entrepreneurship internationally?
A – I think one of the things that we are really excited about at Laurier is that we really feel like we have the building blocks in place.
Once the full slate of courses is rolled out, and we’ve got this alignment between our courses and LaunchPad and all our connections in the community, there’s going to be a couple of things.
One is that we need to make sure the model is scalable. There are lots of students interested in entrepreneurship and we want to try to accommodate as many students as possible.
Moving forward that’s going to be on our minds – how do we scale this but still make sure to keep the Laurier experience what it is: very customized, very individual, all those things that Laurier prides itself on, in terms of the student experience?
I think the second thing is that we really have to do a better job at telling our own story. The fact is that we have lots of alumni in many different areas of the entrepreneurship ecosystem within Canada. We have venture capitalists, we have bankers, we have BBA students that go on to be IP lawyers.
We’re all over the place in the ecosystem. We just don’t do a great job at telling our story, and if you can’t tell your story, then no one knows what you’re doing.
We need to focus on continuing to develop our programming, scaling and telling our story.
