Wally Meyer - Director, Entrepreneurship Programs
David McKinney/University Relations
Wally Meyer, director of Entrepreneurship Programs, helps students from all majors learn the skills they will need to be successful in their business ventures.
Years at current job: Three.
Job duties: Deliver the Business School's vision as architect of the entrepreneurship course of study for all KU students; generate outreach projects with regional businesses to provide "real world" experiential learning opportunities for students in new venture creation and business consulting; founder/director of the KU Center for Entrepreneurship; faculty adviser for the KU Entrepreneurship Club.
The programs are part of the School of Business, yet are open to all students. How can students with other majors benefit from the Entrepreneurship Programs? Students enrolled in KU's entrepreneurship courses learn the process of successfully starting, growing and exiting their own business; a process which applies equally well to all environments, including corporate, where the job objective is creating value for customers and investors. Learning how to successfully commercialize a new idea enables any student to profitably pursue their primary interest or expertise, whatever that might be. Thus far, students from engineering, industrial design, fine arts, architecture, medicine and law have all taken KU's courses in entrepreneurship and acquired the skills to help ensure financial success in a business. Beginning in January all KU students will be able to receive a degree in entrepreneurship, the certificate in entrepreneurship.
How do the Entrepreneurship Programs help students start businesses outside of a classroom setting? Each course in entrepreneurship emphasizes experiential learning opportunities to enable the application of the models and theories students learn in the classroom to real world challenges. In various entrepreneurship classes student teams create their own new business concepts or are provided with a new technology sourced from a KU lab, then prepare a business plan which evidences the marketplace and financial viability of the new idea and compete with other student teams both here at KU and in intercollegiate competitions to win awards and funding to start their created businesses. This activity by multi-disciplined, cross campus KU student teams provides win/win results: the students get hands-on new business development practice, KU gets a technology out of the lab and closer to commercialization and the KU faculty inventor gets to realize the research and financial goals of new technology marketplace introduction.
Do you have any favorite success stories of businesses that were born in or fostered by the Entrepreneurship Programs? My favorite is probably the work several student teams are pursuing in social entrepreneurship, creating new businesses and support organizations to help economically distressed areas of Kansas. One example is the Succession Planning Center LLC concept in which a team of student managers take over a company in rural Kansas which otherwise would be shuttered due to lack of replacement for the business's founder.
This provides the students with an excellent experiential learning opportunity, provides the business founder with a means of extracting the equity he/she has built up in the business and ensures that the rural community does not suffer the loss of the business's economic benefits.
Some other examples: two brothers who graduated in different years but came together to develop their business plan here and have since started a solar energy business in southern California; two industrial design students who wrote their first ever business plan and won the Morris New Venture Award Competition for their own geriatric medical device design; four different student teams who have developed market entry strategies to help commercialize inventions from KU faculty and won awards in intercollegiate competition for their superior efforts.
What do you enjoy most about your profession? While there are several enjoyable aspects of my life at KU, three things stand out. First the opportunity to pay back the good fortune I've experienced during my years in industry through teaching and sharing those experiences with students, secondly since creating new entities is a passion, the opportunity to build an entrepreneurship program and Center is extremely rewarding and thirdly the opportunity to work with the faculty of the School of Business and others across campus: they have been extraordinarily supportive of this new program, provide a hugely stimulating intellectual environment and are just plain fun to work with.
What, in your opinion, is the most important thing a student must learn in order to be a successful entrepreneur? There are four qualities that differentiate a successful entrepreneur. They are: having a passion for the business because starting and growing your own business is hard work; having the perseverance to continue to build the business because there are long odds against first time success; having a customer orientation to ensure a viable market for your offering and executing with excellence because even the best prepared plans will not achieve goals if not aggressively pursued. Students in all of the entrepreneurship courses learn the skills necessary to build upon and develop their capabilities in each area.
What are some aspects of your job others might not realize you're involved with? The entrepreneurial process can be applied to many disciplines. As a result, I get a chance to work with many faculty and staff in many different areas of KU. This most recently includes developing an entrepreneurship degree program (the Certificate in Entrepreneurship) in which the capstone course is taught by the faculty at the students' major area of interest, aided by a course development grant for that faculty member given by the Kauffman Foundation. This enables the student to practice innovative, entrepreneurial thinking in their own area of interest/major subject and the KU faculty to receive an honorarium from Kauffman to help in capstone course development. I've also coordinated with the IPSR to successfully secure a US Department of Commerce grant to help with our social entrepreneurship programs, titled KU Entrepreneurship Works for Kansas.
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