The Samford Crimson

Issue date: 2/3/10 Section: News

Three years ago, the Brock School of Business received a boost when it was renamed after benefactor and renowned Birmingham entrepreneur Harry Brock.  Just before that, however, another important event occurred in the history of the school: the advent of its Entrepreneurship Program.  Now, just over three and a half years after its creation, the program has been named the 2010 National Outstanding Emerging Entrepreneurship Program.

The award, given by the US Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE), was created this year, making the Samford Entrepreneurship Program the inaugural recipient.  Created to recognize entrepreneurial efforts in universities aimed at improving entrepreneurship education, this Emerging Entrepreneurship Program award is just one of many offered by the USASBE, an organization that Franz Lohrke, chair of Samford's Entrepreneurship Program, has been involved with since 2000.  Because of this involvement, Lohrke received the initial application information and got Samford involved early. 

"We submitted our initial nomination material at the beginning of October, and were informed at the end of October that we had been selected as a finalist, along with Creighton University and University of Rochester," Lohrke said. However, the process was not over yet."We then sent in our final packet at Thanksgiving, and I traveled to USASBE's national conference in Nashville to give a 20-minute presentation to the judging panel on January 16."

It was that night, after the judging was completed, that Samford's Entrepreneurship Program was chosen to be the top rising program in the nation.  At the awards presentation it was also noted that over 70 universities had applied for the different awards offered by the USASBE, making this year an intensely competitive one. 

Due to this increased level of competition, Samford had to possess several factors that differentiated its program from the rest. 

"We have Freshmen write business plans during their first business course (BUSA 100), we team teach our capstone Social Entrepreneurship class, and we provide Fellowships every Spring semester that pay our best and brightest students to work as interns in non-profits in Birmingham.," Lohrke said. "Very few universities in the country do any, much less all three, of these things." 

But, Lohrke said none of the program's success is just due to simple chance.

"Before it (the program) launched in 2007, we benchmarked against the top programs in the country, and we discovered that they not only focused on training students in the necessary business skills to start and run a business, they worked hard to create an entrepreneurial mindset in their student," he said. "We adopted this same approach."

Continued...

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