EU-U.S. Atlantis Grant Funds Creation of TECnet

In the past several years, the NC State faculty members have also been invited to share their unique process-based curriculum with other universities and institutions in the U.S. and the European Union.

Now, faculty on both sides of the Atlantic are working together to develop TECnet, a network of resources between U.S. and European institutions that offer the curriculum. Collaborating with NC State are faculty members at Brown University in the United States, Loughborough University in the United Kingdom, and COTEC, a consortium of Portuguese universities.

Their efforts are funded by a recent $70,000 grant over two years from the EU-U.S. Atlantis program to NC State University. The EU partners also received a €70,000 two-year grant to support their part of the collaborative project.

The NC State College of Management offers the entrepreneurship and technology commercialization curriculum as an academic concentration in its Master of Business Administration program, in the college’s Jenkins Graduate School of Management. The curriculum also draws graduate students from NC State’s colleges of engineering, textiles and other disciplines.

Ted Baker, associate professor in the Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship department at NC State College of Management and Roger Debo, director of the college’s Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (TEC) program which coordinates the MBA concentration, are leading the TECnet project in the United States.

Debo has been championing this network for a number of years. “We have been fortunate to work with some exceptionally dedicated and innovative educators around the world,” he said.

“This project will allow us to bring it all together, providing a platform to formalize TECnet. We’ll now be able to share our ideas and further develop our teaching, research and commercialization activities based on best practices developed anywhere throughout the network. This is truly an investment in future growth and productivity for all the participating partners.”

The project will:

• Benchmark policies and practices for high growth entrepreneurship education
• Create a network of collaborative web-based resources that will assist both the educators and students within partner institutions
• Enable collaborative research on the outcomes of process-based technology entrepreneurship education and

• Disseminate the results broadly in order to advance the field and build the network.

Over the long term, the project is expected to dramatically impact the creation of high growth start-ups, Debo said.

“TEC programs have been started now on four continents: North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, and inside of innumerable businesses,” Baker said. “This funding will allow us to continue this expansion and – perhaps more importantly – to develop systems that will allow each of us to learn from the others’ experience and to incorporate these lessons into the fundamental structure and content of our programs,” he said.

“TEC is already the world’s leading process-based technology commercialization and entrepreneurship pedagogy, and the support of the Atlantis funding will substantially increase the pace of our improvements. It will also be the basis for cross-disciplinary, cross-national research on how to support and enhance technology entrepreneurship,” Baker said. The TEC program at NC State was initially funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, with Professor Angus Kingon, now at Brown University, and Associate Professor Steve Markham in the NC State College of Management’s Department of Management, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship as the principal investigators. Funding was also provided by the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science.

“We are creating a master set of slides and teaching materials for this curriculum,” Baker said. Elaine Rideout, a doctoral candidate in psychology and public interest at NC State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, is conducting a literature review on the topic in conjunction with her dissertation examining the impact of entrepreneurship education on student career outcomes. The EU partners are working on a website to host the educational materials and serve as a networking and information-sharing resource.

“We plan to grow this network,” Baker said. “The TEC curriculum recently has been taught in South Africa and South Korea, and we anticipate that the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia will join us in the future,” Baker said.

Atlantis (Actions for Transatlantic Links and Academic Networks for Training and Integrated Studies) is jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and the European Commission’s Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC).

The North Carolina State University College of Management is a comprehensive business college with uniquely focused graduate and undergraduate programs that prepare individuals for careers in today’s dynamic, technology-rich, global business environment. The college’s Undergraduate Programs include bachelor’s degrees in accounting, business management and economics. The Jenkins Graduate School of Management in the college includes the Master of Accounting, Master of Business Administration, Economics Masters’ and Ph.D. programs, and Master of Global Innovation Management programs.