Business partners: how Indiana colleges are stimulating business growth and startups.

• Author: McKimmie, Kathy
• Position: EDUCATION

PUBLIC OR PRIVATE, Indiana's colleges and universities are doing more than preparing graduates for jobs. They're helping create those jobs by stimulating business growth and startups through tech transfer and entrepreneurship programs that lead to new companies, and through business consulting services that keep existing ones strong.

Ball State University's entrepreneurship program, consistently ranked in the top tier across the nation, got another nod from Fortune Small Business magazine in September as one of the Top 25 undergraduate programs in America's Best Colleges for Entrepreneurs. It cited BSU's make-it-or-break-it "senior sweat program" where students present business plans to a group of top business leaders in Indianapolis just days before graduation. "There's no other program in the country that has a pass/fail class that forces their entrepreneurship majors to put the whole degree on the line like that," says Larry Cox, director of the Ball State's Entrepreneurship Center at the Miller College of Business. "Twenty-five percent of them don't pass, so it's got teeth. The students are genuinely risking in order to be part of our program." Those not willing to take quite that much risk will be able to take an entrepreneurship minor beginning next fall.

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About 40 percent of program graduates go on to launch or purchase their own companies, according to an annual survey of Ball State's entrepreneurship alumni.

Tech transfer from university research is the raison d'etre for the Indiana University Research and Technology Corp., and a good example--or actually two good examples--come from the work of Ali Jafari, professor of computer technology, and director of the IUPUI Cyberlab. The first was the ANGEL course management system in 2000, the flagship product of ANGEL Learning, which recently announced a doubling of its workforce to 200 and a move to INTECH Park, Indianapolis. The latest commercial spin-off is Epsilen Environment, a Web-based software package with a wide range of networking tools and services, including ePortfolios--digital repositories of a person's work, group collaboration, object sharing, blots and messaging. Described as an "academic Facebook," it's the result of more than six years of research on the part of Jafari, students and interns at Cyberlab, a research and development laboratory of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI.

In September, The New York Times announced it would use the technology to allow college and university faculty to pair its own articles, graphics, videos, webcasts and other content with course materials and make them available online to students. The New York Times Co. is now an equity investor in BehNeem LLC, the Indianapolis company created to develop the exclusively licensed Epsilen Environment technology from IURTC.

It's no longer true that a person must work 30 minutes away from home, says Jafari. On both a professional and social basis, people from all over will connect through Epsilen. "It's kind of like a Swiss Army knife; everything's in there." Users will create a cyber identity that will still be with them 50 years from now, he says. Once a profile is complete, it will guess what you are interested in and provide it. After a year or two of use, the smart system will automatically find the best material for use based on peer review, and could find 12 good newspaper stories in real time, for instance. Faculty could exchange teaching materials, researchers...