ANN ARBOR Mich.—The University of Michigan plans to offer formal entrepreneurship education to all of its undergraduates within the next two years, officials announced Monday.
Provost Martha Pollack has appointed Thomas Zurbuchen to serve as senior counselor for entrepreneurial education, effective immediately.
“We see this role as one that not only knits together the university’s existing resources in entrepreneurship education, but also expands them, to offer as many students as possible a chance to develop entrepreneurial skills,” Pollack said in a statement.
Zurbuchen will lead the design of a program in entrepreneurship that will be open to all majors and that could be in place by the fall 2014 semester. He’ll also coordinate and grow the school’s entrepreneurial co-curricular activities, including the TechArb student business incubator and innovation-related student clubs.
“A lot of this, we won’t have to build. We just need to bundle,” Zurbuchen said. “Entrepreneurial activities have grown tremendously here over the past decade. This isn’t a top-down effort. This energy is coming mostly from the bottom up, and that’s how revolutions happen.”
Zurbuchen is associate dean for entrepreneurial programs at the College of Engineering and a professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences as well as aerospace engineering. The appointment of Zurbuchen to the counselor post is for a two-year term.
Zurbuchen, who joined the school in 1996, launched the Center for Entrepreneurship in the College of Engineering in 2008.