$8 million endowed to entrepreneurship center

By Amber Tong | Assistant News Editor     10/7/15 3:55am

With an $8 million endowment from the Robert and Janice McNair Foundation, Rice University recently established the McNair Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to act as a bridge between researchers and entrepreneurs.

The McNair Center is housed in the Baker Institute of Public Policy. Director Edward Egan, previously an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School in London, said the center will be equally focused on academic research and government policy recommendation and advising the local business scene.

“We are policy first and foremost; policy also takes a couple different forms though,” Egan said. “At the ecosystem level, we start calling it strategy rather than policy. ” 

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The center will devote much of its efforts towards web infrastructure, including creating a site which consolidates the center’s research projects. In order to build and present the knowledge properly, Egan said, the center will recruit a large number of student workers and volunteers.

One of the center’s first projects is to host a database for patent data and present it in a format with which academics can do analysis.

“One of the biggest challenges in research is [joining] data sets together and a single research takes a huge amount of time,” Egan said. “If a center is willing to step up, it can spread the cost [and generate] enormous gains.”

The McNair Center will partner with the Doerr Institute for New Leaders to provide more comprehensive guidance to the student community.

“Leadership is a crucial part of entrepreneurship,” Egan said. “Most of our input into the Doerr Institute will be in terms of student referrals and trying to build up the entrepreneur ecosystem.”

The founding of the McNair Center coincides with a timely opportunity to drive change in the nation, Egan said, with elections coming up.

“Politicians love to talk about jobs and small businesses,” Egan said. “Despite [all the] innovation policy and talk about entrepreneurship policy, there is not actually a lot happening.”

Egan said he calls for students to come forward and get involved with entrepreneurship.

“We can put all the resources in the world in place, [but] it is very hard to drive engagement,” Egan said. “We want students to be a part of driving entrepreneurship here at Rice.”

Senthil Natarajan, managing director of student-led entrepreneurship platform Rice Launch, said he has concerns about the McNair Center’s  effectiveness given the multiple existing groups also dedicated to entrepreneurship, including Entrepreneurship @ Rice, Jones Graduate School Entrepreneurs Organization and OwlSpark.

“From a practical standpoint, I’m worried about the over-saturation of so-called ‘initiatives’ all over campus,” Natarajan said. “It seems like at some point, there will be diminishing returns, and the startup community at Rice will become more fragmented than unified.”

According to Natarajan, what Rice needs is consolidation of the system.

“We need to focus on developing the pieces that we have, rather than trying to just brute force the development of our startup ecosystem by adding more and more pieces to the puzzle.”

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