I consider myself a very lucky guy, and for many reasons.

One of them is that I get to share my deep, lifelong passion for the topic of entrepreneurship and all it's varied elements (the mindset, the strategies, the challenges, the pursuit, the ups and downs) with others who also care about it or are interested in learning about it. One of the places I get to do this is the renowned Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, where I've been an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for some years now.



"What exactly does an Entrepreneur-in-Residence do?", is a question I hear a lot. I and my fellow EiR's get to do fun stuff like work with students starting their first businesses, coach early stage companies from across the Mid Atlantic region in strategy development and on preparing for presentations to potential investors, judge business plan competitions in Maryland and China, co-teach undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship classes, sit on various conference panels, and occasionally act as lab rats for entrepreneurship researchers.

I also get to oversee our Board Fellows program, where we match MBA candidates with non-profit boards for mutually beneficial pro-bono consulting engagements. And because I've been involved in so many startups, I get to dream up experiential learning opportunities for entrepreneurship students. That's where you, as a student, instead of reading about startups, get your hands dirty in a startup environment and see how bootstrapping a venture looks up close - from conception, through planning, to execution - by working inside one.



Sometime in late 2005 it started to dawn on me that we were doing a great job at the biz school teaching the skills that would prepare students to go out and make lots of money for the companies they worked for, and in the case of entrepreneurship students, for themselves, but we were doing very little to prepare them to go out and make the world a better place. Yet the skills are identical.

So now you know part of the story of how Biodiesel University came to exist: as a hands-on, experiential learning opportunity in social entrepreneurship for business school students. Of course, it very quickly grew beyond that to include students from many other disciplines, and shortly thereafter to include other institutions of higher education. But it's still housed within the business school and being "incubated" at the Dingman Center.

Besides getting to hang around with lots of smart people who care about entrepreneurship, there is also the occasional perk to be enjoyed. Now I'm not anybody's idea of a sports fan, but a few weeks ago my son and I were able to take in a Maryland Terrapins basketball game from a lovely VIP suite at Comcast Stadium belonging to the business school. One bumps into some fascinating people at Smith School functions, and I was having a wonderful chat about sustainable farming with a very warm and down-to-earth fellow named Roger Frock. Turns out Roger was a co-founder and president of Federal Express, who now spends his time writing (Changing How the World Does Business), lecturing at business schools and traveling around helping his wife Linda in her work in alternative healing. Roger's book provides an insider's view of one of the great startup success stories of modern times.

We were joined in conversation by Sharon McLoone from the Washington Post. She was intrigued when the discussion turned to Biodiesel University and wrote a great article about our program in the paper's Small Business blog.

A fun event with my son. Great conversation with business titans. Good press on my favorite project. How's that for a lucky day?