The Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CEI) at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business is now publishing a newsletter called Entrepreneurship360. The newsletter’s aim is to keep students, alumni, others updated on Duke’s entrepreneurship efforts. The first issue features interviews with several faculty and Duke alumni.
For this first issue, I contributed an interview with CEI Co-Director Jon Fjeld:
I was first introduced to the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and its co-director, Jon Fjeld, slightly over a year ago by recommendation of my advisor. “Jon used to teach philosophy,” my advisor explained, “but he’s also built technology companies – he’s certainly has a very unique background. Now he co-directs an entrepreneurship program at Fuqua.” A philosopher and academic who runs technology companies? I was used to stories of entrepreneurs who dropped out of college, not finished and began teaching!
I quickly learned that this unconventional background is important because the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and its mission are also unconventional. Jon discusses his unique background in the interview below, and he explains that it is this unconventional background, along with the mixed and unconventional backgrounds of the others involved with the Center, that bridges the gaps between academics, students, and practicing entrepreneurs. Enabling collaboration between each of these groups of people also means enabling interactions between what each group spends most of its time doing: research, education, and business building.
The Center is valuable because its not just research, not just education, and not just business building. It combines interactions of each type to support a single overall mission, which Jon outlines in the first question of the interview that follows…
To read the rest of the interview, visit the Entrepreneurship360 newsletter website.
