Bronner Center and Hatchery will usher SMG students into e-business

By Eric McHenry

As the digital economy burgeons, SMG students may be tempted to leave school for what appear to be greener pastures. Many feel that their e-business ideas can neither be postponed until graduation nor pursued concurrently with a college education.

Michael Bronner wants them to have their stake and sheepskin too. A successful e-businessman who dropped out of BU 20 years ago to start a coupon marketing company, Bronner says that when students have access to the right resources, education and entrepreneurship become not mutually exclusive but mutually beneficial. That's why he and SMG have established the Michael Bronner e-Business Center and Hatchery, a venture designed to let business students take a shot at business while remaining students.

"My purposes in helping the School of Management launch the center and hatchery are to help students with innovative business ideas while encouraging them to remain in school," says Bronner, founder of the Internet consulting firm Digitas, whose billings are approximately $1.3 billion. "This will permit them to complete their education as they become e-business entrepreneurs."

SMG Dean Louis Lataif (left) and Michael Bronner hope to help fledgling entrepreneurs with the new Michael Bronner e-Business Center and Hatchery. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

"The School of Management is uniquely positioned to take full advantage of Mr. Bronner's initiative," says SMG Dean Louis Lataif. "Entrepreneurial students and dedicated faculty will come together to give life to new business ideas. All of this will happen in the most technologically sophisticated management school facility in the country."

Through the center, SMG faculty will provide supervision and guidance to students who have been selected, on the merit of submitted proposals, to develop ideas for electronically enabled businesses. Once their plans have begun to take shape, the hatchery will put student entrepreneurs in contact with venture capitalists for financial and managerial support. Bronner has interested a number of prospective investors in the program, including Charles River Ventures, General Catalyst, and Highland Capital.

"The venture capitalists we're working with are not simply going to provide funds," says Michael Lawson, SMG associate dean of faculty development and research. "They're going to provide managerial counseling and advice, administrative support, physical space -- in the hopes that collectively those kinds of resources will help ensure that some of these student businesses will be successful."

The venture capitalists, in turn, have determined to give 10 percent of any equity they take in the BU student businesses back to the University. That's a significant gesture of confidence in the center's ability to deliver viable business plans, says Lataif.

"Most of these venture capitalists see a lot of ideas, some of them not particularly well-developed," he says. "I think their collective judgment, to paraphrase Michael Bronner, is that if the development of a business plan has had faculty supervision, the chances are that a lot of the nonsense has been worked out."

Almost immediately following its announcement late last month, the e-Business Center was in business. On March 14, after evaluating a sheaf of three-page proposals submitted over the school's Intranet, a panel of SMG faculty members selected the first seven student teams. Other than excellence, the only criteria were that the proposed start-ups be "substantially technologically enabled" and that the student entrepreneurs, whether undergraduate or graduate, be finished with a designated number of degree requirements. Although the content of the selected plans will remain confidential until they're further along in development, they are conceptually "all over the road," Lawson says.

Students get no academic credit for their efforts, but each team will receive guidance from an assigned faculty advisor. These mentors "will work with the students to whip these business plans into shape," Lawson says, "and get them ready for presentation to the hatchery, if that's what the students want to do." The center will reimburse all teams for expenses up to $1,000, and will award $1,000 in prize money to the teams whose efforts are ultimately judged to be successful. Lawson estimates that once the center is in full swing, SMG faculty will invite 30 or more teams to participate during a given academic year.

Later this month, SMG intends to launch Phase II of the Bronner Center, making the hatchery's resources available to students who have already completed their business plans and to alumni. Faculty representatives will study and vet proposals, then make the strongest candidates available to the participating venture capitalists for possible further development. Popular demand made this addition to the program necessary, Lawson says. Following its announcement, the Bronner Center and Hatchery received extensive coverage in such publications as Wired and the New York Times, grabbing the attention of numerous entrepreneurs who had BU affiliations but were not eligible to participate within the program's original parameters.

"We've gotten a lot of calls from alumni wanting to know how they can participate in this," says Lawson, "and calls from students, too, who already had business plans completed and wanted to get involved. Mr. Bronner was interested in making this as widely available as we could. And we wanted to do that, too -- we were just a little concerned about the logistics of it all -- but I think there's been so much interest on the part of our alumni and current students that we've just got to do it."