Entrepreneurship@10
OSU program celebrates its 10th anniversary this fall
The stereotype of an entrepreneur as a risk taker and visionary is romanticized in popular culture. Who doesn’t love the story of a person who goes for broke, betting all they’ve got on a dream and succeeding spectacularly? But the simple fact is that most business startups fail, no matter how much determination may be involved. Just ask Malone Mitchell III and Amy Mitchell, the husband-and-wife business partners and Oklahoma State University alumni who have successfully started many businesses but who have known disappointment, too.
“We decided early on to pursue being independent business people, but we didn’t have any background associated with that, and so we suffered through some failures,” said Malone Mitchell. “Over time, men who were my father’s age were kind enough to teach me certain things about business that created a process that resulted in success more often than failure.”
That business mentoring resulted in a highly successful company the Mitchells called Riata Energy, which the couple founded while still young married students at OSU in the early 1980s. The Mitchells sold Riata in 2006 when it was one of the country’s largest privately held energy companies and gave some of the proceeds to OSU in one of the largest donations ever made to the university. Half of the gift, $28.6 million, went to the Spears School of Business to fund entrepreneur education.
“As we looked back at the successes we’d had at that point, we thought it would be fantastic if that knowledge could be incorporated into entrepreneur classes and taught to students at a much younger age, so they might go on to generate successful businesses and avoid some of the travails we had gone through,” Mitchell said.
The couple’s gift made possible the launch of OSU’s School of Entrepreneurship and its outreach office, the Riata Center for Entrepreneurship, in 2009, establishing much more than mere classes. Now preparing to celebrate its 10th anniversary, OSU’s Entrepreneurship program is also celebrating the successful growth of the Mitchells’ gift into one of the most successful entrepreneurship education, research and outreach programs in the country and a rare one at that — only a handful of business schools in the nation have an entire school focusing on entrepreneurship.
“We’ve established ourselves as a leader in entrepreneurship education nationwide,” said Dr. Bruce Barringer, director of the school and the Student Ventures Chair and N. Malone Mitchell Jr. Chair of Entrepreneurship. “Our program is distinct in that an entire department is dedicated to entrepreneurship.”
The School of Entrepreneurship includes more than 300 undergraduates majoring and minoring in the discipline as well as hundreds of others from many other programs. More than 1,400 students take classes in the program each semester. An area of growth is a new generation of engineering and science students who hope to use their expertise to launch technology product and services startups and who don’t necessarily want to leave the business side of the venture to somebody else.
“The College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology now offers a minor in entrepreneurship, and that’s unusual because engineering students tend to have degree sheets that are pretty full,” Barringer said. “So, for engineering to free up credit hours for entrepreneurship classes is a real acknowledgement that this kind of training is valuable.”
In fact, a number of technology business startups created by OSU students have been partnerships between Spears and CEAT teams. Just one example is the student-led business Contraire that is designing a wastewater treatment analytical control system developed by CEAT students and faculty joined by a Spears student and faculty who are assisting with a business plan that has won and placed in several competitions including winning the Princeton University TigerLaunch student business plan contest.
In the last five years, 41 businesses have been started by graduate students in the program while undergraduates have launched 52 startups, raising a combined $13.5 million in capital.
The entrepreneurship program also includes doctoral degree and graduate certificate programs that bring graduate students and renowned faculty researchers together on work that is published in top journals. In a recent ranking, OSU entrepreneur researchers tied for fourth in an international ranking of research productivity.
“We’re training doctoral students who work on research projects with our faculty, and we’re placing them in good tenure-track positions around the country upon completion of their Ph.D.s. That’s a real accomplishment,” Barringer said.
Barringer said the program has grown so much in reputation since its inception a decade ago because the department’s 15 faculty members focus exclusively on their field. There is a passion at Spears to help students develop an entrepreneurial mindset and fuel the state’s growing technology economy with the launch of small companies that are creating jobs. Barringer cites a 2018 report by the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission on the impact of technology jobs in the state, which found that the average annual salary for a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) job in Oklahoma is $76,274 while the average annual pay for all occupations in Oklahoma is $43,340.
“We want to encourage technology startups because they just create better-paying jobs,” he said.
And even if a Spears student graduating with a degree in entrepreneurship doesn’t end up starting a business, the unique education makes them appealing to innovative companies that seek creative employees.
“The way we teach entrepreneurship, it’s more than just starting businesses,” Barringer said. “We always say there are three career tracks for our students — first is starting a business; the second is becoming a leader in a small or family business; and third is innovating within an existing company. All companies are interested in new markets, new products and new ways of thinking and those are the value-adds that our graduates bring to a job.”