Entrepreneurship Panels Winter 2010

The U. of C.’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship hosted multiple entrepreneurship panels in Winter 2010, with excellent turnout. Here’s a quick mash-up of the highlights:

Exploring Entrepreneurship: Innovations in the Midwest Education Industry

Best Talk: Provider of online learning K12 Inc (NYSE: LRN) reported an astounding 96% parent satisfaction rate for their curriculum quality. CEO and founder Ron Packard made the case that as virtual classrooms become more mainstream, they have the potential to completely eliminate the need to build new schools in the US.

K12’s online delivery platform allows students to take classes from their homes 4 days per week, and requires students to be present in a physical classroom setting only once per week. The advantages of having reusable curriculum content delivered via scalable technology has obvious advantages — reusability justifies spending more dollars on developing a truly quality curriculum.

K12 schools are accredited by respected accreditation bodies and boast 160+ courses, including World Languages and AP. More than 10 years in the making, K12 has achieved traction as the largest provider of online learning, with over 1 million courses delivered to date.

Noteworthy: Check out social language learning on-line with Live Mocha, the world’s largest language learning community with 4 million+ members.

Innovation Workshop “The Current Environment of University Startups”

RPX Group’s co-founder and managing director Bob Okabe discussed startup activity at universities across the nation, in an effort to understand the new venture development process and its relationship to university support in a systematic way (the full presentation and set of slides are available here). Slides 54-59 descrbie investor activity and a statistical breakdown of why investors are so interested in the oft-heard multiplier 10x (as in, VC’s are looking for companies that may be sold for at least 10x the initial investment). Slide 66 describes where investors gain the confidence to invest in a deal — the 2 biggest sources of confidence are interest by fellow investors and past successes of the entrepreneur.

Noteworthy: University of Chicago, while it does not have an engineering program, across other disciplines is faring well with regard to support for research patents and associated start-ups.

Net Impact Conference

Best Talk: This conference included speakers from both Zipcar and I-Go. Both companies take pride in reducing the societal and environmental costs of driving, although I-Go differentiates itself as 1) a not-for-profit and 2) the only car-sharing company that has 100% low-emission vehicles. While a smaller enterprise than Zipcar, I-Go is also the only car sharing service that offers a combined CTA / I-Go smartcard.