Entrepreneurship at Northwestern: Fad or Fixture?

In recent months, interest in entrepreneurship at Kellogg and Northwestern seems to have generally been increasing. Support, resources and attention has risen to match this interest. I'm almost jealous that I'm graduating now, rather than starting at Kellogg at this point. Things were was not always this way.

When I arrived in Evanston in Fall 2009, there was little - if any - acknowledgement that Kellogg, and Northwestern, should be a place that a person should consider if they were genuinely interested in entrepreneurship. Since then a number of new initiatives have arisen. Here are some of the notable ones:

• Northwestern's Farley center expanded its NUvention entrepreneurship courses from one to three, and won national acclaim for them.
• At Kellogg, the Levy Center has opened an incubator to support student startups.
• For social entrepreneurship, there is noticeable support from the Levy Social Entrepreneurship Lab and KIN (pdf).
• The tradition of Northwestern Entrepreneurship Week was started last year. This year's is this coming week.

Sometimes the older folk at Kellogg reminisce that this kind of fervor is similar to the dot com era. At that time, there were large valuations for tech companies, and large IPOs - not too disimilar to what we have seen of Facebook and Groupon valuations, as well as the LinkedIn IPO. So I wonder if all the attention and interest will last once things in the external environment change.

The reality is, entrepreneurship plays a huge role in the economies of countries and the world. While Stanford may be a hub in the West, and MIT a hub the the East, the Midwest has been lacking strong leadership in this area. This is a shame, because entrepreneurship in the Midwest has its own, unique culture.