Program Descriptions
Alternate Valuation Infusion
In order to equip students to successfully apply entrepreneurial principles, it is critical that each be fluent in understanding and ability to communicate and organize resources around non commercial values, such as social, economic, and environmental. The McGuire Center embeds these considerations throughout the curriculum, dedicates compensated mentor role to assisting each student in identifying, illustrating, measuring, and building expanded cultivator pools for innovations based on values specific to the venture.
The center has organized and hosted an international colloquium focusing on this topic and has published a volume entitled Measuring the Social Value of Innovation: A critical link in the university technology transfer and entrepreneurship discussion.
Mentors in Residence
A central teaching role that replaces the historical, part-time adjunct teaching model as a means to bring experienced entrepreneurs to the classroom, with a roster of three full time [8-5 M-F], HIGHLY experienced entrepreneurs, as the cornerstone of McGuire’s entrepreneurship program. Each of these mentors hold full time, salaried positions. They contribute to curriculum development, teach weekly in the capstone courses, and mentor venture teams from program acceptance through to graduation, effectively eliminating the inherent disconnects of entrepreneurship education. This model has received significant national attention as a solution to many of the historical problems of teaching venture based entrepreneurship and blending theory and practice.
Business/Law Exchange™ and Mock Law Firm
Business/Law Exchange
Established in 2007, the purpose of the Business/Law Exchange is to increase the knowledge, understanding, and learning opportunities of issues of business and law, and particularly at the intersection of entrepreneurship and law. This is of distinct importance as business and academic communities continue advancement in an innovation-based economy. Exchange programs and activities to advance the study and application of law in business environments and the ability to maximize business opportunities through understanding of key legal issues include research, new courses, business and academic community engagement, interdisciplinary fellowship, research, and teaching opportunities focusing on areas key to 21st century business development and the related industry and legal issues [ie law/business/bio/water/etc ]. The Business/Law Exchange is overseen by co-directors in law and entrepreneurship.
Mock Law Firm
The Mock Law Firm program uniquely advances a university entrepreneurship environment to create a dynamic, yet highly scalable and transferable model for learning and teaching among both entrepreneurship and law students focusing on innovation related practice.
This partnership of the colleges of law and business will create a mock law firm environment, with new venture entrepreneurship teams serving as the mock law firm’s client pool. The two groups learn from one another key the skills and knowledge to make them successful in their chosen fields. The relevance of this pedagogy in the 21st century knowledge economy is considerable. Unlike law clinics, which limit one-on-one engagement among law students and clients, the mock law firm students engage with new/nascent level firms from the earliest business development phase and through innovation exploration and actual venture planning, development, funding applications, and launch. In an experiential learning capacity, law students gain knowledge of the needs and challenges of entrepreneurial firms at all phases, adding significant value to the education of students in specialties ranging from patent to corporate law.
Entrepreneurship students likewise receive valuable information and experience at the earliest stages of concept exploration, allowing them to better assess the potential of new knowledge-sets, as well as to engage with the legal community on an ongoing basis and to include legal issues and considerations in strategy and operations/management phases. Traditional law/legal adjunct models of entrepreneurship education have positioned faculty/adjuncts to bring in legal assistance when warranted, but do not provide ongoing engagement through all phases. Other difficulties exist in duplicating a real world exposure to legal counsel within entrepreneurship studies. This approach provides the best of both worlds for these two student groups.
Organizational and Personnel Profile
The McGuire Center’s unique organization and personnel profile contributes significant strength to educational delivery. It spans access, authority, and expertise, relative to student needs and institutional design:
- Research Chair: Focus exclusively on the creation of interdisciplinary research in entrepreneurship, from innovation to commercialization.
- Center Director; Co-director, Business/Law Exchange: Responsible for all academic, organization, development, new initiatives, student recruitment, and operations, as well as development and oversight of Business/Law Exchange with counterpart in College of Law.
- University Entrepreneurship and Knowledge Transfer Specialist: Ph.D. in Higher Education with dissert in university entrepreneurship. Responsible for:
- enhancing university-wide integration
- maximizing intersection of entrepreneurship and technology transfer (position partially funded by UA Office of Technology Transfer)
- Teaching
- Mentors in Residence: Full-time in house successful entrepreneurs who teach capstone courses and mentor entrepreneurship teams.
- Associate Adjunct Professor, Law: Practicing lawyer to design, deliver, and oversee Mock Law Firm course to students from IP Transactions, Corporate Law, Tax Law, and Entrepreneurial Law — who in turn engage with entrepreneurship teams as their client pool.
- Academic and Communications Mentor: Provides leadership and support for practitioner level faculty (entrepreneurs, lawyers, investors, etc.) to create and deliver engaging coursework and learning activities. Most practitioner faculty do not have formal teaching experience. As such, practical knowledge is not well conveyed in the classroom. Position translates meaningful knowledge to learning.
- Information and Communication Technology Specialist: Leadership for faculty, practitioner, students, and staff to maximize all activities through identification of IT/CT, including class management and student learning (i.e., wiki-based venture plan organization activities and mock law firm interaction) and increasing student exposure to state of the art applications from which their ventures can be based or maximized (web 2.0/social networking/enterprise applications, etc.), center communication, and information management.
- Student Service Manager: Oversees all student service and organization needs, including organizing and managing practitioner level faculty.
- Director of Rural Entrepreneurship and Tribal Initiatives: Oversees development of programs, coursework, research, and activities to stimulate entrepreneurial growth, culture, and opportunities in rural areas, ranging from individual ventures to policy advising.
- Regular Faculty: Finance, marketing, engineering, music, law, science, etc. to support discipline specific and interdisciplinary courses and opportunities in entrepreneurship.
- Technology, Alternate Valuation, and Communication Mentors: Advancing specific elements of venture, allowing it to provide sustained experiential learning foundation, rather than reverting to “academic.”
Intellectual Property Role and Management
McGuire is a leader in intellectual property teaching, management, and protection for students. The center has partnered with the UA Office of Technology Transfer and University General Counsel to develop formal Memorandums of Understanding to govern entrepreneurship student participation in the assessment and commercialization of university and of other third party owned intellectual property — ensuring that value — and IP created by entrepreneurship students in the form of the venture plan — is protected. The program has also worked with the OTT to develop an Intellectual Property Decision Tree, for student and faculty use. The Center director serves on the university’s IP committee and subcommittee, by invitation and for the purpose of advancing recognition of student generated value. In the end, what is created by students in the program is owned by students in the program (does not include initial third-party IP). Finally, all entrepreneurship students are required to conduct and submit comprehensive Intellectual Property Owner Profile assignments on all projects, ensuring that full understanding of IP position is understood. This applies even when the IP owner is the student him/herself.
Office of Technology Transfer Partnership
The McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship has a celebrated, sophisticated, and functional relationship with the UA Office of Technology Transfer. Formal agreements, shared positions, joint projects, including multiple funded shared projects, are among the means by which students are exposed to high-value opportunities in the McGuire Entrepreneurship Program and realize the greatest opportunity for ongoing value. A sampling of shared/common activities include:
- Lab innovation audits
- Social value of innovation colloquium
- Technology Transfer and University Entrepreneurship Colloquium
- Technology Transfer Handbook
- Intellectual Property Decision Tree development
- OTT personnel serve as technology mentors
- Shared knowledge transfer position
- Destech: options fund for joint OTT/McGuire Center ventures, funded by local angel group— [not used as startup funds. Funds used to advance research or development to move high potential ideas to market]
Land Grant and Knowledge Management: a 21st Century Approach
The McGuire Center is developing knowledge management offerings as a means to take university value to the community under the opportunity of land grant. This philosophy is the basis for rural entrepreneurship and other non traditional extensions of entrepreneurship education and application. The concept introduces Land Grant as an effective organizing factor for the teaching, study, and application of entrepreneurial principles — expanded as knowledge valuation and knowledge management. The Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act was designed to facilitate agriculture and mechanical arts teaching and study in U.S. states and territories. These topics were targeted as the knowledge sets that were, at the time, vital to sustaining community and economy. In today’s knowledge economy, knowledge sets vital to sustaining community and economy include those that advance the value and use of complex knowledge sets as commodities and that can illuminate the uses and potential gains of new knowledge — the ability to assess, value, and manage new information and ideas through the application of entrepreneurial principles.
The IdeaPath™
The McGuire Program’s curriculum model, titled the IdeaPath, has become an award-winning pedagogy that underwrites all entrepreneurship teaching in the McGuire Entrepreneurship Programs, and across the university. It has established curriculum principles that all teaching areas can build on, regardless of field of study or intended outcome. In order to prepare individuals to apply entrepreneurial principles, it is first important to recognize that not all users of entrepreneurship education identify themselves as entrepreneurs, or seek the education for traditionally associated entrepreneurial purpose. The ability to organize effectively to deliver consistent, high quality education to students from as many as 20 different fields of study and including masters, PhD, and post doc, it is important to identify when, where, and why entrepreneurial principles are applied, and then build curriculum around that. A sequence, or entrepreneurship continuum is both illustrated and defined below. By isolating entrepreneurship to the process of moving innovation to a mechanism where it can be delivered to those for whom it is created (e.g., business), we can then identify natural phases of entrepreneurial process: Formulation; validation; strategies; venture plan authorship; fluency, funding, and application. Through the application of this process, the McGuire Center successfully and efficiently organizes intellectual and capital resources to maximize student outcomes.
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