Students thrive as innovators
Entrepreneurship and innovation, the new faces of economic recovery in the United States, have long been a part of the Trojan Family.
President Barack Obama signed the America Invents Act on Friday, which will reduce wait time for patent applications by awarding patents to the “first to file” instead of the “first to invent” party.
“Here in America, our creativity has always set us apart, and in order to continue to grow our economy, we need to encourage that spirit wherever we find it,” Obama said in a speech after signing the bill.
To USC students, this “spirit” is nothing new.
Currently, 47 startups founded by USC students and faculty have an active status in the business world, according to the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation website.
Students received more than $150 million to form their companies from public and private sources in 2008 and 2009.
Thomas O’Malia, professor of clinical entrepreneurship and director emeritus of the Lloyd Greif Center, said the current innovation culture goes back to the 1960s when research took place in the basement of Bridge Hall.
“We are as a university staging constant opportunities to pitch [student] ideas and help [them] get money for [their] startups,” O’Malia said. “[Succeeding in entrepreneurship] is not a medical school thing where you pass a test … It’s the individual and the hard work.”
By the 1970s, the basement work had spawned a full-blown masters’ degree in entrepreneurship — the first in the country.
Ian Murphy, director of communications at the Stevens Institute, said a recent study at USC showed 57 percent of students expect to start a venture and 47 percent expect to start their own nonprofits.
Kathleen Allen, professor of clinical entrepreneurship and director of the Center for Technology Commercialization, also identified student initiative as a key element in the university’s reputation for growing startups.
“USC has a very high concentration of student entrepreneurs and students who think like entrepreneurs,” Allen said. “Our students believe that they can create their own opportunities. We’re fortunate that a lot of these students remain in Southern California to start businesses.”
Students, however, said faculty and administrative support is essential to invention.
Anna Sergeeva, a senior majoring in business administration, founded trueRSVP, an Evite-like website that keeps track of attendees’ “flakiness” records, with two other USC students last semester. They won the Alpha Pitch Award for college students at DEMO, an emerging technologies conference in Silicon Valley. Sergeeva said USC’s academic environment is particularly conducive to student innovation.
“A lot of the students are very driven — lots of individual schools at USC are at the top of their field,” Sergeeva said. “There’s a high caliber of people and obviously the faculty are very supportive.”
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 80 percent of Americans who want to start a business are between 18 and 34 years old — but startups in 2008, the Kauffman Index recorded, were overwhelmingly founded by older age groups. Those between 55 and 64 years old outnumbered the young cohort by almost 40 percent.
In USC’s case, though, the trend has historically been reversed. Allen said undergraduates have dominated startup activity until the last few years, when graduates began “catching up.” A sluggish economy and disillusionment with previous jobs in industry prompted graduate students to start their own companies.
Tracy Lawrence, who graduated in 2011 with a degree in business administration, is co-founder of catering and food truck-booking website Chewse.com. She said USC is not a creative place in the literal way.
“It’s not creative in that you’re artsy, but creative in that you create things, you create businesses,” Lawrence said. “I’ve been able to create something by reaching out to the people at USC, given the resources of USC. We don’t just lay foundations, we create things.”
Jon Vidar, who graduated in 2006 with a Master of Arts in communication management, also created his own company. In 2007, Vidar teamed up with two other recent graduates from the program to combine their abilities in writing and communication to launch their own nonprofit in Rwanda.
“We wanted to help locals tell their tales,” Vidar said about their choice of venture. “We thought that in the age of YouTube, having an undocumented genocide was really unfair.”
Their startup, The Tiziano Project, survived on the founders’ out-of-pocket payments until 2009, when they won a Chase Community Grant worth $25,000. Since then, the nonprofit has won a steady stream of grants and is setting its sights on a Palestine-Israel sister project next year.
While mentoring and funding schemes are available via the Stevens Institute, Annenberg, the Lloyd Greif Center and other USC programs, an independent personality also characterizes university innovators, Murphy observed.
“Out here, people like to be mavericks,” Murphy said. “They like to do their own thing.”
Correction: A previous version of this article stated the 47 startups were all started by USC students, when in fact they were started by both students and faculty.