Eric J. Toone, Vice Provost and Director of Duke’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, recently wrote an article for TechCrunch Magazine.
Duke Today also published the article, which features the DukeEngage in Detroit program and Suhani Jalota (’16), who completed a DukeEngage independent project.
Toone writes:
“Recently, the Princeton Review and US News and World Report published rankings of university entrepreneurship. Among the top 12 schools, the two lists share but a single institution – Babson College. How can two highly regarded agencies compile lists of excellence that have virtually no overlap?
At one level, the answer is obvious: the two groups use different criteria and so arrive at different rankings. But the use of two sets of criteria that yield such wildly differing results suggests a much deeper problem. A lack of consensus regarding what to measure implies a lack of consensus about the goals of university entrepreneurship: it’s hard to measure success when you don’t know what that success looks like. So what is the role of entrepreneurship at the University?”