Build It and They Will Come

Dec. 2, 2003

Taking a Start-up Approach to Enhancing Women’s Leadership and Entrepreneurship

By Thomas Kohout

There is a process to developing a start-up venture. To launch a new enterprise one needs to come up with a creative new idea and then develop that concept through market research. Once a well-defined plan has been formed it’s time to find the capital necessary to get the project up and running. Then it’s back to the focus groups and market research to refine the plan and smooth out the details. They’re all steps on the path to entrepreneurship, but in the case of the School of Business and Public Management, they’re also the steps to launch a pair of new electives — the Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Network.

“If you’re going to teach entrepreneurship and business start-ups maybe you ought to practice what you preach,” explained Eric Winslow, professor of behavioral sciences and Department of Management Science chair, about the business-like approach he and Susan Duffy, director of the Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Initiative, took to launch the initiative.

Like most start-up ventures the leadership courses began as an idea for something else. Shortly after Mount Vernon College joined GW, the business school was looking to launch a women’s entrepreneurship/small business bootcamp. Initially the goal was to develop a six-week summer course to attract women from all over the country in addition to serving as a pre-freshmen seminar. It didn’t work as well as had been planned and many observers felt there wasn’t sufficient interest in the project.

“I said, ‘Well, you asked the wrong people,’ ” said Winslow, who was confident that a course aimed at potential women business leaders could succeed. He turned to then-doctoral student Susan Duffy to take a second look at developing the initiative.

“What we did is very true for entrepreneurial ventures,” Duffy recalled. “We took that original core and shifted it to where the market really is.”

They decided to focus on juniors and seniors, because they might have a better understanding of themselves and what they want to do once they graduate. They kept the core entrepreneurship focus, but supplemented that with laboratories pursuing professional, personal and leadership development ideas. The students also were surrounded by prominent women business leaders as speakers and guest lecturers.

A chance encounter at a professional conference between Duffy, Winslow and Michael Camp, then-director of the Kauffman Foundation got the project moving in high speed. The pair described to Camp their idea for a women’s leadership and entrepreneurship course, and before they knew it, they were crafting a letter to the foundation outlining their goals.

“We didn’t think this was a proposal for funding,” Winslow recalled. “We thought it was a letter saying, ‘Hey, here’s what we’re thinking of doing. How would we go about getting funding?’ ”

Camp wrote back with an offer for $150,000 to fund the project for three years.

“It was probably the easiest $150,000 I ever got,” Winslow confessed.
During the design phase Duffy made some connections with Springboard Enterprises, a non-profit women’s leadership organization in Washington.

“Springboard has been an absolutely fantastic strategic partner for us,” said Winslow. “They gave us entree into women investors, women angels (venture capitalists), women entrepreneurs — it could have taken us years to gain access to those groups.”

“We said, ‘What would you have wanted, back in your undergraduate education, that you know you need now and had no idea then that you needed it?’ ’ recalled Duffy.

The responses they received included skills in finance, leadership, risk tolerance and understanding the entrepreneurial process and how to make sales or look at markets. “That’s everything that we tried to jam into this course,” added Duffy.

On the basis of those interviews, as well as Duffy’s own experiences launching businesses, she created a prototype and tested it last year. Following the initial launch of the classes, she conducted more focus groups, this time with students, to gauge the impact of the changes they made. What they discovered was that because the requirements for the course were so stiff, students weren’t sure they wanted an elective that made them work harder than many of their major courses.

“They gave us some early warning signals and we cut it back,” Winslow explained. “But we came out of it with an overall positive feeling that this was an elective that young women, especially seniors, would see as a helpful elective and a growth experience.”

“I’m struggling as an instructor with ‘do I cut it down and make it more reasonable for an elective, or do I keep it rigorous and possibly turn off some people?’ ” Duffy said. “What I’ve found is that students get so excited by the challenge they produce, and I work with the students individually to see to it that they do the work.”

The resulting course combines class work, labs and special events to develop a formalized process for evaluating ideas, investigating feasibility, assessing resources and implementing a plan of action. Lectures and weekly labs break down the business jargon into tangible examples of developing ideas, recognizing the difference between ideas and opportunities, refining those ideas with research, and developing a clear plan that outlines the goals of the business for potential investors or partners. Students tackle exercises and self-assessment tools designed to evaluate leadership strengths and identify areas for development such as effective communication, conflict resolution and negotiation.

“Students walk away with a really well-developed document that they can show anyone and say, “I did this, I know how this process works and I can apply it to any other activity in my life,” Duffy said.

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu