Next week will mark Alan Carsrud’s first
anniversary of arriving at FIU. Even he is surprised at what
he has been able to accomplish in a single year in building the
University’s interdisciplinary Global Entrepreneurship
Center.
“One of the main reasons I left UCLA to come to FIU was
the entrepreneurial spirit that guides FIU, from President Mitch
Maidique and our deans right down to many of my students,” Carsrud
said. “I am absolutely amazed at the “can-do” spirit
and the lack of institutional barriers to getting things done,
compared to older, established universities.”
Under Carsrud’s leadership, the Global
Enterpreneurship Center is embarking on a concerted campaign
to expand entrepreneurship
education across the university and into the community. He has
spent most of his first year building an infrastructure for the
Center, which will launch the first of a wide array of programs
in 2004.
The list of accomplishments is impressive. Early
in the year he obtained a $50,000 grant from the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City that is being used to build
a series of teaching cases on family business, a Thought Leaders
lecture series in technology-based entrepreneurship in conjunction
with the College of Engineering. Utilizing the expertise at FIU
in many fields dealing with Latin America, the Center also obtained
a $4.2 million USAID grant, in conjunction with Winrock International
(formerly the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation), to help support
agribusiness entrepreneurship in Central America. In addition
to obtaining funding, Carsrud led the effort in planning several
major initiatives that have already been launched or will be
introduced in 2004. These include an International Research Scholars
Program, funded by grants from the Academy of Finland and the
European Union, which brought a Finnish scholar to FIU this year
to work on cross-cultural issues in entrepreneurship, and an
Institute for Family Business, to get under way in early 2004.
Within the last month, a new web site (www.entrepreneurship.fiu.edu)
has been introduced that provides greater detail on the program’s
current and future programs.
Perhaps the Center’s most impressive
accomplishment, however, was securing a second $50,000 Kauffman
Foundation planning grant
by becoming one of 15 finalists for a grant of up to $5 million
from the Kauffman Foundation under its Kauffman Campuses Initiative,
which is funding programs at 5-7 universities to expand entrepreneurship
education on a university-wide basis. The proposal process includes
an in-person presentation by President Maidique this week, with
a final decision to be made in January.
“FIU’s Center will be truly interdisciplinary,
and its programs will expand well beyond the traditional narrow
focus of many entrepreneurship centers -business and engineering,” Carsrud
said. Business and engineering will nonetheless be an important
part of the Center’s activities, he indicated, adding that
deans Joyce Elam of the College of Business Administration, Jose
de la Torre of the Chapman Graduate School of Business and Vish
Prasad of the College of Engineering have not only been supportive
of the Center but also have been close partners in the enterprise. “The
planning process for our Kauffman Campuses Initiative proposal
has been truly a university-wide effort,” Carsrud said,
indicating that a steering committee of deans, faculty and staff
that helped put the proposal together was drawn from almost every
school and college and division of FIU.
“We want to get across to FIU’s students, faculty,
staff and alumni that entrepreneurship is an attitude toward
living,” Carsrud said. “It is a way of life.”
Before coming to FIU, Dr. Carsrud, who has professorial appointments
in both business and engineering, was the academic coordinator
at the highly-ranked Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies
in the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, where he spent
13 years. Before that, he headed entrepreneurship centers at
the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern
California. Carsrud also has a distinguished history as a practitioner
as well as a scholar of entrepreneurship. He has been involved
in numerous start-up ventures in food products, biotechnology,
professional services, venture capital, electronics, computer
software, and People Express Airlines.
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