By Thomas Zurbuchen

"I hear about entrepreneurship almost every day now – it’s amazing how the University’s emphasis on it has changed my son’s life."

A proud mother spoke those words to me during a recent honors brunch where some of our best students received well-deserved awards. The event honored the brightest and best students – an exciting thing for a teacher to see – but it turned out that my greatest satisfaction, that day, came from the personal thanks that so many parents and students gave me for the University of Michigan’s decision to stress entrepreneurship – and they’re right; there’s a buzz across campus, and it’s all about entrepreneurship.

The heart of the University’s entrepreneurial thrust is the Center for Entrepreneurship, where faculty, students and staff can find the resources, expertise and environment to help them transform innovative ideas into rewarding, valuable ventures. One of those resources is a slate of activities, conducted in partnership with other organizations: MPowered Entrepreneurship, a newly founded student group; the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, a unit of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business; entrepreneurs, lawyers and business facilitators, such as Ann Arbor SPARK or the Detroit Regional Chamber; and an ever-expanding entrepreneurial community in the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere.

I’ve been the Center’s director for six months, and that short tenure has had a profound effect on me. I believe more than ever that the Center is important – no, it’s vital – to our University and to the surrounding community. I’ve seen how it has changed people’s thinking at the grass-roots level and created an unmistakable buzz.

I’m a numbers guy, so let me describe it my way.

MPowered has nearly 100 members and regularly communicates with 750 U-M students. The Center conducts Entrepreneurship Hours – weekly presentations on topics related to entrepreneurship – that became so popular, so quickly, that we had to move our sessions from a classroom that holds 140, to one that holds more than 400. More than 70 students competed in our first elevator-pitch competition. Forty-one entrepreneurial students and faculty took a spring-break trip to meet entrepreneurial U-M alums and absorb their lessons learned. From January to March, we interacted with 59 new small companies, many of them with ties to the University. We’ve connected a number of them with faculty, and they’re writing proposals together. Eighty-two companies came to the University’s first small-company job fair. Of those 82, 21 were partners with Ann Arbor SPARK. MPowered organized interviews with these companies – and more than 650 students were signed up.

Those are the numbers, which I find exciting. But I get just as excited when a mother tells me that the University’s entrepreneurship push has changed her son’s life. I got chills of excitement at a recent Entrepreneurship Hour, where we enjoyed a talk by Keith Cooley, the Director of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Development. After the presentation, he sat down and said, “You have an amazing group of students – I’ve never seen anything like them. You can feel their energy and their excitement. More people should see that!” Those are the kinds of things that have been making my day, of late.

Why? Because he and that mother saw how the spirit of entrepreneurship has taken hold of the University. And the Center for Entrepreneurship is right in the middle of all of it. Creating a positive outlook. Giving people courage, which is at the heart of entrepreneurship. Creating teams with entrepreneurial purpose. Encouraging innovative vision. Connecting entrepreneurial minds. Listening to entrepreneurs who ask for help, and saying “yes” to them as often as we can. Or listening and saying “no,” sometimes, because it’s also our job to put ideas under a microscope to see if they’ll have what it takes to grow into something special, something new.

I admire people with this entrepreneurial spirit – they do things differently and courageously. Students who have the opportunity to take company jobs and make big money decide they’d rather pursue their own innovative ideas. Faculty, consumed with research and teaching, still find time to transform innovative ideas into entrepreneurial dreams. And staff members, exhausted after a long day’s work, are ingenious and energetic enough to transform everything they touch into entrepreneurial wonders.

Entrepreneurship and its empowering characteristics are ever-present at the University, these days. People talk about it. Think about it. Read about it. Write about it. Go to class for it…. Entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial spirit have become an integral part of Michigan Engineering and, with the Center’s encouragement, they’re becoming the heartbeat of business development throughout the State of Michigan, encouraging the participation of current faculty and students, as well as our alums who’ve been there and done it. This is a great time to jump aboard the entrepreneurship express!

Thomas Zurbuchen, an associate professor in the departments of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, and Aerospace Engineering, is the director of the Center for Entrepreneurship.