Entrepreneurship and Virtue
“Bringing Your Business to Life,” a new book co-authored by our very own Dr. Jeff Cornwall (director for Belmont’s Center for Entrepreneurship), is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com. The book has already received excellent reviews and is sure to be a great read.
Also of note, Dr. Cornwall’s weekly column for The Tennessean was recently referenced in an online U.S. News and World Report article about choosing a business partner. You can find Dr. Cornwall’s full column, which includes a list of issues you should discuss with potential business partners, here.
Be sure to check out Dr. Cornwall’s blog, The Entrepreneurial Mind, if you haven’t already!
Next fall, Belmont University will begin offering a major in Social Entrepreneurship. The fundamental idea is to provide a practical academic curriculum to serve the fastest-growing segment of society—the millions of individuals that are creating a society of citizen change agents. It makes sense. This is where much of the new job growth is, not to mention that some of the jobs are the most challenging, ethically based and well-paid. Bill Drayton is a pioneer in social entrepreneurship who, in 1978, founded Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. Drayton states that the citizen sector is growing explosively. “It is generating jobs two and a half to three times as fast as business. There are now millions of modern, competing citizen groups, including big, sophisticated second-generation organizations, in each of the four main areas where the field has emerged most vigorously: Brazil-focused South America, Mexico/U.S./Canada, Europe, and South and Southeast Asia.” (For more information, go to 
It is encouraging that the scholarly literature necessary to support an academic discipline like social entrepreneurship is growing. Morris Bornstein’s book How to Change the World provides a kind of In Search for Excellence for social entrepreneurs. If you are at all interested or intrigued by social entrepreneurship, I encourage you to read Chapter Eighteen entitled “Six Qualities of Successful Social Entrepreneurs.” Indeed, Bornstein’s conclusion that successful entrepreneurs are the ones determined to achieve a long term goal that is deeply meaningful to them, is a worthy foundational principle for our new program at Belmont University.