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Academic Entrepreneurs

Bay Path Students Learn by Doing

Lauren Way, Bay Path College’s director of Entrepreneurial Programs and Cooperative Education.

Lauren Way, Bay Path College’s director of Entrepreneurial Programs and Cooperative Education.

Lauren Way, director of Entrepreneurial Programs and Cooperative Education at Bay Path College, likes to say that the school’s programs in entrepreneurship do more than prepare students to start and manage their own business. In short, they promote entrepreneurial thinking, something that can help people in all fields, employers and employees alike. The school has even created its own term to describe the mindset it promotes: ‘entre-vation,’ which blends entrepreneurship and innovation.
Before a conversation began about the nature of entrepreneurial education, Lauren Way posed the hypothetical question, ‘what exactly is an entrepreneur?’
“Some would say it’s a person who takes the risk to start and run a business,” she continued. “Others would say that an entrepreneur is not a social or financial category at all, but rather it is a philosophy, a state of mind that focuses on seeking out opportunities, taking action, and finding ways to solve other people’s problems in a profitable way.”
Way is Bay Path College’s director of Entrepreneurial Programs and Cooperative Education, and she told BusinessWest that teaching college students the tools for starting one’s own business has a practical application that is more important than ever.
“About 50% of the current crop of undergraduates will own their own business one day,” she said, referring to the nationwide population of students. “They don’t realize it yet, but that is a statistic that is cited more and more often. And that’s all students, not just business students.”
Sure, she continued, there is also the statistic that says somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of new businesses will fail in their first five years, but, she countered, “what that number doesn’t tell you is that the majority of those people go on to found another business.”
As part of Bay Path’s commitment to providing students with a career-focused education, the college has been fine-tuning its entrepreneurial academics on all levels, with offerings from graduate programs all the way to summer sessions for area high-school girls.
“At Bay Path, what we think is that employers want entrepreneurial thinking in need-finders and problem-solvers,” Way explained of the college’s mission. “That’s what our curriculum focuses on … not specifically that you’re going to start your own business, but asking what entrepreneurial thinking is all about.”
With that summer program gearing up, Way met with BusinessWest at her desk surrounded by the supplies for her upcoming week-long session. She explained how Bay Path is the leading entrepreneurial spirit on campus, and how the school hopes to be more widely known nationwide for its ongoing commitment to making entrepreneurial education not just a necessary discipline in higher education, but also a cultural mindset.

The Gifts That Keep on Giving
Way gives much credit for the beginnings of the entrepreneurial programs at Bay Path to the contributions of two charitable organizations.
She credits the Springfield-based Harold Grinspoon Foundation with “doing the impossible.”
“They were an early catalyst in getting 12 local colleges together for an Entrepreneurial Initiative [EI],” she explained, describing that organization’s mission. “Not an easy task to get such a number of schools all on board.”
Those colleges meet once every year for a conference at the MassMutual Center, and as testament to the growing popularity of entrepreneurship at the schools, the number that started out at 50 students this past year numbered close to 500.
In addition, Grinspoon’s EI endows an annual elevator-pitch contest between the colleges, with the winner taking home $2,000. Bay Path has had, in Way’s words, “unusual success” at the competition, taking top prize in five of the seven years, and placing in six.
The Coleman Foundation, based in Illinois, funds educational entrepreneurial programs across the country. Way said that its goal is to instill entrepreneurship on campuses, to make it interdisciplinary, and to embed it into a business department’s curriculum. Through a grant from that organization, she came to Bay Path.
But she said that much credit needs to go to the college’s president, Dr. Carol Leary, for her visionary approach to making Bay Path a fertile ground for all of these initiatives.
“One of the reasons I came here from Hampshire College,” Way said, “is that we are such an entrepreneurial college. In the four years that I’ve been here, we have started 10 new master’s programs. Talk about need-finding — we’re finding the needs of our students, and our region.”

Pitch Perfect
Way said that one of the biggest advantages to teaching entrepreneurship at Bay Path is the size of the college. “We’re small enough that we can focus on reaching all the students from all the different disciplines,” she explained.
In addition to the undergraduate program that is a focus of the business department, there is a certificate program that Way launched last spring for students in all majors. Psychology and Education draw a great deal of students to the program, she said. “Many of them want to start their own child-care centers,” she said, “or they want to invent their own game or learning tool.”
A capstone course for juniors and seniors is ‘Entre-vation’ (a word copyrighted by the college), which is described as a hands-on approach to entrepreneurship and innovation.
While business courses are typically taught by the Harvard Case Study method, Way explained that much of that dates to the 1980s. Entre-vation takes a different approach.
“During the summer, I choose five local entrepreneurs,” she continued, “and do a case study on them. We spend the first five weeks interviewing those businesspeople, learning what makes them tick, how they got started, what their background was.”
The students team up to offer innovative solutions to real-life cases entailing problems or challenges for these businesses. By the end of the course, the student teams present their findings to the business owners, often with surprisingly acute and helpful suggestions.
The next step up is a master’s program in Entrepreneurial Thinking and Innovative Practices, which is open to both men and women, and much of the course work can be completed online. There are students from across the U.S., and even one from Afghanistan, she said.
“We had a student at our last commencement, graduating with his master’s,” she said, “and he had never been to the campus before!” But, she added, there is a high level of interaction with professors in the online classes.
It is the MBA program that sets Bay Path apart from its contemporaries, Way said, describing the non-traditional student body for that degree.
“On the one end of the spectrum you’ve got the Millennial generation, then Gen-Xers, to Baby Boomers, even beyond, in their 60s,” she said. “I’d say that the average MBA student is in their mid-40s or 50s. I love those students … they know what they want to get out of their education, they have been in the world long enough to see links between the classroom and the world. They have hooks to hang the theories on. They have a wealth of material to bring to other students in the classroom.”
In addition, there is a Saturday Program, or the One-day Program, which Way describes as targeted to older women who never got their undergraduate degrees. “They don’t have to fit their schedules around classwork,” she explained.
But as she motioned around her office crowded with supplies for her upcoming one-week summer session, she spoke of the next generation of entrepreneurial education.
Going into its fourth year, the week-long training session is called “It’s My Business,” and is targeted at underserved area high-school girls. For a total of 40 hours in one week, the girls will have readings by high-school and college-aged entrepreneurs who hit the million-dollar mark, seminars with similarly-aged local business owners, and during this time the students will devise a plan for a startup company of their own.
The week ends with an elevator pitch before an assembly of faculty and peers. “Talk about stage fright,” Way laughed.
“Most of these girls say that there’s absolutely no way they can do that, but we have a great speech coach from Connecticut who helps them through it. And they all do it. It blows me away.”

Success Stories
Bay Path students have excelled in peer challenges, and Way is quick to point out how her students have exceeded her expectations more often than not. A sophomore Biology student won the campus elevator-pitch competition, sending her to the Grinspoon challenge with other local colleges, and Way said that “this was a student who was so shy that she couldn’t even make eye contact when I first met her.”
However, her idea for “popper stoppers,” a porous ear plug designed to help with fluctuating atmospheric pressure — no more ears popping on flights — won her campus renown as well as the top prize in the area challenge.
“The fact that our students win against all these other colleges,” Way said, “with older graduate students, and in some cases people who already have owned their own business, is incredible.”
But the successes from Bay Path alumni aren’t isolated to the collegiate arena. Way proudly told the story of Stacey Bilodeau, a woman yet to finish her bachelor’s degree, whose three-year-old company, Independent Solutions, saw $70,000 in revenues in its first year, with a spike to $500,000 dollars the second year, and 13 additional employees.
Bilodeau started full-time work at the age of 13, and quickly realized a vocational passion — working in home health care. “She started working for someone else,” Way said, “and saw the problems inherent in that industry. She realized she could do better than this.”
Providing home care for patients with traumatic brain injuries, Bilodeau is presently looking to hire new staff to help her meet great demand. And that’s where Bay Path’s education helps her keep the wheels on the ground, learning how to make the passion for her field grow in a measured and successful manner, while maintaining the high level of service and care that brought her to this role. Approaching the end of her third year, Bilodeau plans to double the size of her staff and expects to make $1 million.

Learn By Doing
Bay Path takes a philosophical approach to teaching entrepreneurial initiatives, but Way said that she doesn’t frown upon encouraging students to begin a business, even if there’s a better-than-average chance that it will fail.
Learning from mistakes is a growing theme in entrepreneurship, she explained, and added that people tend not to learn from their successes, but rather from their failures.
“Starting a business right away allows them at least to get in there,” she said of current students entering the business world, “and it makes them realize those pieces of their education that they do need to work on. Maybe they find they need more math skills, or customer service. Doing it helps you figure out what else you need to learn.
“It’s important for students to be exposed to failure to see how they react and to see what messages they will take away,” she continued, adding, “You can’t learn to dance by reading about it.”
Way sees Bay Path’s model of entrepreneurial training eventually having important ramifications not just in the workforce, but in society at large. Her hopes are for the college to become more widely known as the premier college for undergraduate and graduate students in entrepreneurial thinking.
“I would love the phrase ‘academic entrepreneurs’ to describe the way we do things here at Bay Path,” she said.
“We can all be more entrepreneurial,” she added. “We can take a more entrepreneurial approach with our jobs, with our relationships, in our communities and our churches. This method of thinking is really for everyone. It’s not just about starting a business. It’s about finding needs and meeting them — finding solutions for problems in a profitable way.”