By Monica Friedlander

May 2008 — In an effort to promote entrepreneurial activity among its students, UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science has announced the establishment of a new Entrepreneurship Initiative — a joint undertaking with Berkeley’s distinguished Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haas School of Business.

Among the project’s first new undertakings is the development of new courses to address the needs of the College’s students and faculty, whose diverse backgrounds in areas such as biological sciences, social science and the humanities differ significantly from those of students in professional schools.

"Creating this new window into the world of entrepreneurship will help L&S students and faculty accelerate the application of ideas from their labs and classrooms toward the solution of important problems in our society — from health care to energy, from economic development to bridging cultures," said Mark Richards, the executive dean of the College of Letters and Science.

The first course to be offered through this project will be “Letters & Science 5: An Introduction to Entrepreneurship"  designed for freshmen and sophomores in the College. The course will be taught by Lester Center's Robert J. Majteles. The initiative will also provide graduate students and faculty in L&S with convenient access to Lester Center’s programs and resources. The College of Letters and Science attracts about three quarter of UC Berkeley’s students and about half its faculty. 

The initiative may seem to be a departure from the college’s historic academic culture, focused largely on the acquisition and distribution of knowledge for its own sake. What the initiative will accomplish, in fact, is offer students and faculty the tools needed to solve today’s world challenges. Although Berkeley has increasingly emerged as a world leader in cutting edge scientific fields — such as clean technologies, biotechnology, and nanotechnology — very few of the scholars involved in these discoveries have experience in the creation of new enterprises.

L&S has decided to embark in this new direction in light of a significant shift in the research, cultural and technological environment in which knowledge is now being acquired, both here on campus and around the world. Three major factors contribute to this shift.

L&S is making research opportunities a reality for an exceptionally large number of undergraduates. As many as half of Berkeley’s 24,000 undergraduate students are currently engaged in meaningful research, a percentage that is expected to continue to increase.

The boundaries between academic disciplines are rapidly disappearing, making the entire campus community more interconnected. A molecular and cell biology student, for instance, may be equally interested in learning about economics and in ways to turn a research venture into a practical enterprise.

Finally, in this era of exploding communications, students have access to enormous amounts of information and are highly connected with one another, factors that are bound to encourage the sprit of innovation and entrepreneurship.

The College of Letters and Science would therefore like to encourage its students, who have expertise in a much wider range of subjects than previous generations of entrepreneurs, to lead the way for new venture creation in new and exciting areas.

The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, founded in 1991, is the primary locus for the study and promotion of entrepreneurship and innovation in management and new-enterprise development at Berkeley.

The Entrepreneurship Initiative was made possible by the support from a group of alumni representing venture capital firms and corporations in a variety of scientific and technological domains.