Honors Section : Outcomes

McGuire students are in exceptional company. According to a study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, McGuire entrepreneurship graduates, as compared to business non-entrepreneurship graduates, earn higher salaries, report better job satisfaction, and own more assets.

Since the first class graduated in 1985, more than 900 students have successfully completed the McGuire Program. Students have launched more than 250 new ventures, and about 10 percent of Program graduates are currently at the helm of their own company in diverse businesses:

• Growing Business Solutions, built on retail POS software
• Foresight Detection, built on lung sensor technology
• Hear’s Music, which distributes specialty CDs
• ESAN (Equipos y Sistemas para Almacenamiento), a construction- and material-handling equipment company in Sonora, Mexico
• Split Engineering, built on mining software distributed in 90+ countries
    

What You Learn

There are a number of skills students master in the McGuire Program. Each is vital to success as an entrepreneur, innovator, or knowledge mover.:

• Discovery
• Visualization
• Planning
• Execution
• Selling
• Building
• Collaboration
• Articulation
• Resourcefulness
• Creativity

Entrepreneurs need these skills to:

• Identify an opportunity and market need
• Conduct market research and analyze research as it applies to an idea
• Build product, market, and competitive knowledge
• Validate concepts and build value propositions
• Overcome barriers to entry and establish strong competitive advantages
• Mitigate risk
• Conceptualize product and forecast sales
• Sell ideas, plans, products, and themselves
• Build advisory teams
• Find the right customers
• Forge strategic partnerships
• Hold themselves, staff, and your stakeholders accountable
• Adapt to changing market needs, competition, and technology
• Manage and grow a venture or initiative
    

The Intellectual Property You Create

The experience of the McGuire Program is real — even if teams do not intend to launch a venture, they create something of value that may be sold or implemented later.

Thus, the new venture plan developed over the course of the year is copyrighted as property of the team which developed it. It is the team members' intellectual property and will never be distributed outside of the classroom without permission.

If a team works on a project based on someone else’s technology or concept (UA research, for example) or works in tandem with another non-business team for research and development, the Program helps teams establish a Memorandum of Understanding that outlines expectations as well as ownership of ideas, materials, and the business plan itself.
  

For further information, please contact us.