Business Is Booming
at the
University of Oregon

Few students at American universities are as thoroughly trained in the art of entrepreneurship as those graduating from the University of Oregon's Charles H. Lundquist College of Business.
"What makes us special is the extent to which entrepreneurial attitudes, strategies, and energies color every aspect of what we do," says Dean Tim McGuire. "Our program celebrates individual enterprise, the faculty encourages it, and our students get to experience it firsthand."
Since being named dean in 1994, McGuire has worked to reinvent and revitalize the business college. Under his guidance, entrepreneurial thinking has become a staple for the college's 1,700 undergraduates and 200 graduate students.
The first year of an M.B.A. student's course of study, for example, is organized around working with a functioning company to develop a business plan for a real product. Students take courses in a sequence that supports and reinforces their entrepreneurial activities.
"I call this the Just-in-Time educational philosophy," McGuire says. "It ensures that students have a real-world application for everything they learn as they learn it."
This approach is helping the college earn widespread recognition. U.S. News & World Report recently placed Oregon's undergraduate program among the best of the best, ranking it in the top 3 percent in the nation.

Another contributor to these impressive rankings is the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship. Established in 1989, the center links the academic and business communities and, according to Director Mark Lange, "provides students with an entry to the world marketplace as it really exists, with its dazzling opportunities, its cavernous pitfalls, and its infuriating unpredictability." Last year, the center was recognized by Success magazine as one of twenty-five up-and-coming entrepreneurship centers in the country.
A sampling of the center's offerings includes

"These kinds of programs," Lange says, "expose our students to a much richer learning environment than that which can be created in the classroom alone."

One of McGuire's favorite mottoes is Practice What You Teach. What better way is there to instill in students the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes of an entrepreneur than for the college and its faculty to model it? A good example of this modeling is the center's New Venture Network. Conceived only last year, the network aims to identify and develop promising new-venture projects; recruit qualified participants from the college, university, and business community; and help negotiate contracts to further the project. In the true spirit of the entrepreneur, the college will take equity in the projects it helps develop.
Program director and professor of management Alan Meyer is impressed by the experience the network offers students. "New Venture students learn as they do business and do business as they learn. It is a remarkable synthesis," he says.
Why the strong emphasis on developing students' entrepreneurial spirit at the Charles H. Lundquist College of Business? Dean McGuire explains that, while most business graduates will not be directly involved in what is traditionally thought of as entrepreneurial activity (starting a company, for example), all will benefit from an enterprising spirit. "Today," he affirms, "virtually all businesses must act entrepreneurially. Having these skills and this important experience gives our students a significant competitive advantage."

Back to INQUIRY, Spring 1996

©1996 University of Oregon