Entrepreneurship Education in Action | Tom Byers with Deanna Badizadegan | TEDxFargo

Entrepreneurship education has become much more than teaching students how to start a business or write a business plan. Tom Byers, a professor of engineering at Stanford University for over twenty years in this subject, shares four examples of this wide adoption of active and experiential learning to accelerate all student’s careers. First, a recent graduate Deanna Badizadegan tells her story about how entrepreneurship education has shaped her career path and her passion for music including a short performance on viola. Then Professor Byers give more examples of entrepreneurship education in action on a national scale (e.g., NSF-funded programs to reach to hundreds of USA colleges) and on an international scale (via a required course of all undergraduates in the United Arab Emirates). The fourth and last example illustrates how these principles can apply to other domains such as national security and government.

At Stanford University since 1995, Professor Tom Byers focuses on education regarding high-growth entrepreneurship and technology innovation. He has been a faculty director since the inception of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, which serves as the entrepreneurship center for the engineering school. He is a principal investigator and the director of the Epicenter, which is funded by the National Science Foundation to stimulate entrepreneurship education at all USA engineering and science colleges. He is the co-author of a textbook called Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise, published by McGraw-Hill.
Byers is a past recipient of the prestigious Gordon Prize by the National Academy of Engineering in the USA and Stanford University's Gores Award, which is its highest honor for excellence in teaching. Tom holds a BS in industrial engineering and operations research and an MBA from UC Berkeley. He also earned a PhD in business administration at UC Berkeley.


This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx