Final Report on Coleman Fellows Program; Transforming Entrepreneurship

June, 201

Created by two successful entrepreneurs, the Coleman Foundation has made entrepreneurship education a central focus of its grantmaking since 1981.  Coleman Foundation resources have anchored entrepreneurship teaching in many U.S. universities and colleges.  Our most recent initiative, the Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows Program, is the subject of this final report. Download Report

For a decade, the Fellows Program supported faculty with entrepreneurship expertise to work with colleagues across campus to infuse entrepreneurship education into courses taught outside the school of business, with the longer-term goal of having such classes grafted into curricula.

We are proud of the Program’s success.  With limited funding, using a model with a few requirements and ample room for local adaptation, and through the creativity and commitment of faculty and administrators, the Program has helped entrepreneurship education take root and flourish in more than two dozen institutions well beyond business schools.  Discipline-specific courses, from anthropology to zoology, now also address key principles and skills of business creation.  In each of these fields, entrepreneurial learning is relevant, but only in the recent past has that become more widely acknowledged and addressed.

Our hope is that by describing the Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows Program, we offer useful material for colleagues in philanthropy, our academic partners, and others wishing to prepare students across disciplines to create their own jobs and become business owners.  We always intended to increase the political capital of those teaching entrepreneurship, and we hope that this is another resource toward that end.

Michael W. Hennessy

President and CEO

The Coleman Foundation