Globe and Mail: Programs give startups a ‘hedge against failure’
Nov 12, 2015
All SFU students who take BUS 238 (students from Applied Science, Arts & Social Sciences, Science, Environment and Business pictured above) can now take the Certificate in Innovation & Entrepreneurship alongside their primary degree.
The following is an excerpt from an article published in the Globe and Mail on November 4, 2015.
By Jennifer Lewington, Globe and Mail.
The same strategy underpins a new interdisciplinary certificate offered this fall through Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business, in collaboration with five faculties and a campus-based student incubator. Starting in second semester, undergraduate students from across campus can earn the seven-course certificate while completing their bachelor degree.
As at Smith, the Beedie certificate gives students exposure to experienced entrepreneurs and other experts who provide advice and guidance on building a sustainable startup.
“This [certificate] allows students from every faculty access to a rigorous entrepreneurship and innovation education,” says Sarah Lubik, director of entrepreneurship at SFU and a Beedie lecturer in entrepreneurship and innovation. By design, students from varied disciplines collaborate on a real-life project, either in the for-profit or not-for-profit sphere, as a final component of the certificate.
“It gives you the opportunity to work with people who don’t think like you, [like] when you get out into the real world and find out that few people think like you,” says Ms. Lubik, who in her non-university life is marketing director for Lungfish Dive Systems, a British-based high-tech startup that has developed a rebreathing system for divers.
Beedie’s certificate is part of a broader strategy by SFU to position itself as a postsecondary leader in innovation initiatives.
In October, the Burnaby, B.C., university opened Venture Labs in downtown Vancouver as the West Coast hub for a new pan-Canadian business accelerator network operated in partnership with Toronto’s Ryerson University and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Ont., to promote the development of digital technologies. The 24,000-square-foot facility, now the largest business accelerator in British Columbia, received $10.7-million from the Canada Accelerator and Incubator Program to encourage collaborations between scientists and engineers as well as co-operation among those pursuing community-based social innovations.
That focus on collaboration appealed to Mark Wijaya, an international student from Indonesia who is pursuing the Beedie certificate while he works on two startups. One of them is Avian Robotics, which applies drone technology to provide live-streaming aerial photography for security uses such as search and rescue efforts and postaccident site inspections.
“Before taking the certificate I never understood what entrepreneurship and innovation really were,” says Mr. Wijaya, an arts major. “I thought it was all about making money, but it is really about looking at things differently and saying, there is a problem – how can I solve it?”
The move to teach entrepreneurship and innovation through real-life ventures that bring together students from a variety of disciplines appeals to employers.
“You are not talking business student to business student; all of a sudden you are talking business student to engineering student and that is a totally different conversation,” says Michael Shields, Vancouver-based tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. An ability to work in teams with co-workers from different backgrounds, he adds, is as essential for a startup as for a big company.
“Right now, there is so much change in business that you need to be able to amass support for what you are doing and deal with the bumps in the road,” says Mr. Shields. “This is the start of students being aware of that.”