Miami University: Entrepreneurship and Economic Placemaking

Today we welcome Dr. Tim Holcomb, who is Founding Chair of the Department of Entrepreneurship, Director of the John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship, and a Farmer School Endres Associate Professor Fellow in the Farmer School of Business at Miami University. On the show we went into the history of the department, and their new class that focuses on economic placemaking and quality of life to attract and retain top talent. Dr. Holcomb previously held the Jim Moran Professorship in Entrepreneurship and served as Executive Director of The Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship at Florida State University. While at Florida State, Holcomb helped raise $100M to establish the nation's largest interdisciplinary entrepreneurship school, the Jim Moran School of Entrepreneurship. He earned his Ph.D. in strategic management and entrepreneurship from the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, and he earned his bachelor's degree in accounting and information systems and his MBA from the University of Louisiana at Monroe. He received the 25th Annual Golden Arrow Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Louisiana at Monroe in 2005. Winner of the 2020 NASDAQ Center of Entrepreneurial Excellence Award given annually to the top entrepreneurship program and institute in the world, Miami's Entrepreneurship program is internationally-recognized for outstanding academic research and immersive, practice-based learning programs in startup and venture capital, social entrepreneurship and impact investing, corporate innovation and technology commercialization, and creativity. In its annual ranking of the top entrepreneurship programs in the world, Entrepreneur Magazine and The Princeton Review® has ranked Miami's program in the "Top 10 Undergraduate Public Schools for Entrepreneurship Studies" for 13 consecutive years, reaching the Top 5 among publics for the first time in 2020. Since 2015, annual student demand for entrepreneurship courses at Miami has grown by more than 700% in credit hours (to 15,890 credit hours) and almost 450% in the number of students that take at least one entrepreneurship course (to 3,219 students).