The following article is a courtesy of the Florida International University Media Relations Department.

Carsrud and Interdisciplinary Center Expand Educational Entrepreneurship Throughout University

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, 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 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.