Donning a Wired cap, jeans and a button-down collared shirt, Sean Branagan hopes his informal demeanor will provide a welcoming atmosphere as he waits for students to approach his table in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

A freshman strides toward Branagan’s table, marked with a sign that reads, ‘Talk to me about Newhouse’s brand new Digital Media Entrepreneurship program!’ The student then discussed his self-created advertising agency for 20 minutes.

‘This kid just blew my mind. He’s a freshman, and he’s got a business already, very well connected. It’s fascinating,’ said Branagan, an adjunct professor in the School of Information Studies and a founder and inaugural director of the Newhouse Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, after the student left.

The center launched earlier this month, making it the third center on campus that provides students with help in starting businesses.  

Tom Kruczek, director of the Falcone Center of Entrepreneurship in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, said the program can help students balance entrepreneurship among other aspects.

‘It’s hard to be an entrepreneur as an adult, but it’s harder as a student because you have your social life, academic life and entrepreneurship life,’ Kruczek said. ‘We can be gateways. A student can walk in, and they’ve got someone to talk to.’

Syracuse provides an outlet for entrepreneurs, said Kruczek, who previously worked at Rollins College, a small school in Orlando, Fla.  

‘The biggest thing here is that everyone is talking about this stuff,’ Kruczek said. ‘Students are talking about this, and there’s already all this energy and buzz about entrepreneurship.’

Branagan said he’s not worried about a lack of student interest in the program.

‘The ones who come up to me are the ones with courage, and that’s who I want to be talking to,’ Branagan said. 

A 1980 Syracuse University graduate, Branagan majored in magazine journalism in the wake of the Watergate scandal. But when it came to a career, Branagan wasn’t as excited about journalism as he used to be. 

Instead, he became a serial entrepreneur. Over and over, he created technology firms and interactive media companies, focusing on Web development and social media marketing. But he had an idea that a little contraption — the computer — would revolutionize society.  

So in 1998, Branagan first approached Newhouse school officials with ideas to create entrepreneurship opportunities within the media program. 

Due to other projects and various changing of hands at Newhouse, Branagan couldn’t hone in on bringing his entrepreneurial ideas to fruition in 1998. Then in 2008, when Lorraine Branham joined the Newhouse faculty as its dean, Branagan re-pitched his idea. Branagan leveraged his resources from the iSchool and Whitman to form a collaborative effort for the initiative. 

Students are captivated, Branagan said, and many are in different stages of the entrepreneurial process. Some simply have an idea or concept, and others are already starting their second and third businesses. 

‘This entrepreneurship stuff is hot,’ he said. ‘It’s wonderful when someone’s studied it, but if you’ve never done it, it’s awfully hard to understand.’

There’s a greater interest in entrepreneurship across campus because students have stopped searching for jobs and started creating them, said Kruczek, the director of the Falcone Center of Entrepreneurship in Whitman. Having seen an older generation of longtime, loyal employees be subject to random layoffs, students have a newfound drive to mold their futures more directly. 

‘Your generation wants more than to make money, you also want meaning,’ Kruczek said. ‘You look and don’t necessarily see the risk. You see people like Mark Zuckerberg and the Twitter founders, and they’re all young people. You go, ‘Shoot, I can do that.”

mainthia@syr.edu

Published on March 23, 2011 at 12:00 pm