And these days, with a shaky market for tech IPOs and a general slowdown in private investment, thriftiness is back in style.
“I think everybody’s going to continue to sow a lot of seeds,” Gernon said. “But people are going to have to do more with what they get.”
That doesn’t mean the mood is dour around the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. On Tuesday afternoon, students and professors will welcome a crowd of innovation junkies to campus for the annual New Venture Competition, which will award $150,000 in prizes to promising startup founders.
The Rock Center was started in 2003 with a $25 million donation from venture capitalist Arthur Rock, who was an early investor in tech companies including Apple and Intel. The center offers programs to help HBS students and alumni pursuing entrepreneurial careers.
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This year’s eight finalists, split between traditional business and “social enterprise” categories, are seeking to solve some pretty difficult problems. Their projects span the worlds of education, energy efficiency, and even recreation.
Health care, however, is a prominent thread running through several of this year’s finalists.
They include Girls Health Champions, which aims to recruit adolescent girls as peer-to-peer health educators, and Astraeus Technologies, which hopes to develop a test that can detect lung cancer by analyzing the gases in a patient’s breath.
Gernon said many of the finalists reflect a belief that entrepreneurs will likely be the ones to solve some of society’s biggest problems, rather than lumbering corporate incumbents or government agencies.
It’s the kind of big thinking that gets investors fired up, too. “They’re looking for that billion-dollar company. And I think any of these have the potential to get there,” Gernon said.
Curt Woodward can be reached at curt.woodward@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @curtwoodward.
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