Tom Miller, founder of the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program and vice provost of distance education learning teachnologies, remembers when Larry K. Monteith, former dean of the college of engineering, made a risky move in front of the chancellor and trustees at the time, saying “students succeed in spite of their engineering education.”

“What he meant was that [the students] really didn’t leave with the skills to translate technical skills into start-ups and products,” Miller said.

Since the inception of EEP, Miller has seen countless students sky-rocket into stellar careers as entrepreneurs. Angela Thompson, a former student in computer engineering, came up with a low-cost and durable laptop specifically for kindergarten through twelfth-grade classrooms. Her team presented their prototype to Steve Wozniak while he was on campus, and preceded the “One Laptop Per Child” initiative by nearly ten years, according to Miller.

Another group talked with hospital administrators and government officials in India and developed a low-cost tuberculosis test.

“The problem [with tuberculosis] was that each diagnosis is expensive and requires skilled technicians,” Miller said, which is not feasible for developing nations.

“By the time you find [a diagnosis], one thousand people are infected.”

Some of Miller’s work connected him to Bob Young before Red Hat existed as a company.

Donnie Barnes, an EEP student at the time, turned down traditional job offers to be a part of the team which took the Red Hat start-up from an unknown entity to a world-renowned software company, according to Miller. He also watched one of his graduate students, Scott Wingo, make $20 million when he and two co-founders sold their first company, Stingray Software. Yet Miller points out that being an entrepreneur is more than monetary success.

“Most entrepreneurs are not going to get rich,” Miller said. “People will tell you [your idea] will fail; it will likely fail.”

In these terms, the birth of EEP in 1993 was much like an entrepreneurial venture.

“I was told by some senior faculty, ‘How can you sleep at night? This has no place in engineering,'” Miller said. “But I knew in my heart and from these kids I had worked with that this was the right thing to do.”

His experience as an “accidental entrepreneur” demonstrated how much extracurricular knowledge students might need to turn the dreams they had into commercial products.

“[The program] is a business appreciation course,” he said. “I want the engineers to appreciate what they need to know beyond the technology—what I didn’t know.”

The story began in 1990, when the University was adopting Unix work stations.

“They had incredible power, but no software,” Miller said. “You’d boot the thing up, and all you’d get was a terminal window.”

When he created some spreadsheet software, General Electric picked up his idea.

“Very naively, I said we would make it into a commercial product,” Miller said.

After pouring countless nights and weekends into the process and making plenty of mistakes along the way, Miller realized his success might have come more smoothly had he known just a little bit more about how businesses operate. “Usually, after a failure, you become successful,” he said.

“We want to give [students] this experience in college, where they can meet people who have gone before. Maybe then we can increase their chances of success by just that much.”

But the idea of success has by no means sidetracked the program’s original focus.

“It’s not about starting companies; it’s about teaching students,” Miller said. “We’re making a difference.”

More specifically, Miller wants to change the work experience his students will have.

“I want the engineering students to be leaders, not engineers who live in cubicles and are told to create this product,” Miller said. “I want them to use their own ideas and knowledge of the world.”

EEP projects teach students leadership skills and innovation while helping them understand the whole market process and financial issues.

“These are the skills companies are looking for,” Miller said. “When interviewers come to this part of a student’s resume, they talk about EEP for the rest of the interview.”

Current EEP students can attest to the difference this program has made in their education, such as Adam Litowsky, a senior in computer engineering, and Stephen Chua, a senior in electrical and computer engineering. They are part of the team “writeidea,” and are beginning the second semester of their project.

“You learn a lot more about the real world,” Litowsky said, comparing his project to the senior design course. “Here, you have to find the problem and find the customer.”

They also learned how government policy and budget constraints could quickly derail a project.

“We had an idea with road markers,” Chua said. “People liked it, but we were just jumping through hoops.”

“At the end of the day, no one wanted to give us any money,” Litowsky said.

Other students at the beginning of their first semester have noticed the same emphasis on realistic problem-solving.

“This program involves us thinking outside the box,” said Quan Ha, a senior in electrical and computer engineering. “We don’t think about books, formulas, or given problems, but business, research, and marketing.”

Even better, the one credit-hour course, ECE 383, makes these experiences available to students of all years and majors.

Spencer Williams, a senior in electrical and computer engineering, took ECE 383 before enrolling in the senior-level course. He worked for a team writing a program which could extract data from pictures of blood samples.

“I signed up to get experience before I had skills, so I could get a real job later,” he said.

His work was garnering employment options before his senior year. Still, Stephen Walsh, the current director of the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program and associate professor in ECE, has more than technical expertise in store for the members of the class.

“I designed the program as a simulation,” Walsh said. “I want the students to have a hard time because that’s where you learn.”

From cold-calling exercises and networking requirements to business plans and presentations, every obstacle trains the EEP students to become valuable commodities.

“Engineers don’t like to hear it, but there are a lot of engineers out there,” Walsh said, recalling his experience hiring employees. “There’s a lot of really smart technical people, so how do I differentiate them? For me, a person with a 2.5 to 3.0 who could communicate trumped a person with a 3.5 who had very low communication skills and found it difficult to work in a team.”

The team-work and collaboration between disciplines provide the majority of the energy and innovation in which EEP prides itself.

“The popular press likes to make you think about this lone wolf entrepreneur,” Walsh said. “That’s really such a myth. You need so many people to help you make it as an entrepreneur.”

To encourage these connections, Miller and Walsh teamed up with other EEP faculty to create the idea of a living and learning community for entrepreneurs. One of the future dormitory buildings on Centennial Campus would connect to The Garage, a combination of workshops, prototyping areas, and meeting spaces.

“We need to build something where we can get students from across the curriculum working on multidisciplinary projects,” Walsh said. “When you get people from different backgrounds working together, you get better ideas.”

Companies such as Red Hat have made significant donations to open the Phase I Garage in Research Building Four. Following the ribbon-cutting on Monday, this facility is open for applications from students in any college interested in getting their ideas off the ground.

“It’s a space where [students] can go and talk to other people in an entrepreneurially-minded way and develop ideas without spending an exorbitant amount of money,” said Seth Hollar, associate director of EEP and assistant professor in the MAE department. “It’s not a lab for senior design.”

The Phase I Garage, which has about one-tenth the square-footage of its proposed fully-fledged counterpart, houses a woodworking workshop, electronics lab, library, loading dock, and two or three meeting rooms.

“One of the key aspects is communication,” Hollar said, echoing Walsh’s focus on the non-technical issues engineers are not often trained to anticipate. “We want to give them a place where they can express their ideas to others.”