Kauffman Campuses Initiative: A study that explores the phenomenon of cross-campus entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs drive the United States economy by creating small businesses that in turn create jobs. Colleges and universities have been capitalizing on this small business driver for decades by creating entrepreneurship education programming. Indeed, since the first entrepreneurship education class was offered in 1947, the field has grown exponentially, with more students studying entrepreneurship than any time in history. Entrepreneurship education is a relatively new field of study in higher education. Born out of business departments, it is now embraced by scholars across academic disciplines. It has evolved further with support from entrepreneurship centers and the creation of majors and minors in the field. In order to grow further, it must continue to stretch into interdisciplinary territories. Most research supports this movement beyond the business school, yet there is very little to support educators and administrators looking to embed entrepreneurship across their campuses. A recent effort by the Kauffman Foundation to seed entrepreneurship in departments outside of business schools provides data and space to study the phenomenon. In 2003, the Kauffman Foundation launched its Kauffman Campuses Initiative (KCI) with the goal of creating a campus-wide experience among diverse schools so students would begin to develop a more “entrepreneurial perspective.” Leading an investment of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars from 2003 to 2012, the Kauffman Foundation supported grant-funded programming on 18 college and university campuses. This study attempts to understand what happened on the respective campuses after the KCI grants ran out: what factors influenced successful implementation of entrepreneurship programming, and which campuses were able to sustain these programs after the grant period? It gathers data from the 18 KCI institutions, the Kauffman Foundation, and the Burton D. Morgan Foundation in order to show the initial and sustained impacts of the grants upon cross-campus entrepreneurship initiatives. It employs a qualitative approach to tell a cohesive story about the KCI schools and to extrapolate from that story those characteristics that support successful and sustainable implementation of entrepreneurship programming