Written by Shanthal Perera

Entrepreneurship has captured the modern zeitgeist. It’s a concept that has been glamourized by Hollywood movies and television, with the help of gritty and glitzy underdog stories of unicorn ventures.

Most entrepreneurs will tell you this image is a far cry from reality, however, that shouldn’t diminish how important entrepreneurship is in a fast-changing world.

With the rise of new technologies causing major disruptions across industries, the ability of entrepreneurs to recognize opportunity, adapt, and be resilient will be essential to how economies adjust to this new framework.

But entrepreneurship wasn’t always the buzzword it is today, particularly on university campuses. It took years for the field to establish itself as a legitimate curriculum and research area. It’s a narrative that relates closely to the history of entrepreneurship at the Ivey Business School.

Today, Ivey’s Pierre L. Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship serves students and entrepreneurs at multiple levels, providing support through ideation to launch, to managing high growth. And through its Business Families Centre, the Institute has continued to support a segment that has played a defining role in Canada’s past and will continue to ensure the economic health of its future.

With the expansion of entrepreneurship to solve social problems around the world, the Institute has embraced practitioners and research in areas of prosocial organizing and social enterprises. In 2017, the Institute had the honour of hosting a rare special issue conference defining the research landscape in the field of social entrepreneurship with many of the top minds in the field.

Despite decades of developing entrepreneurs through the Western Business School, and later the Richard Ivey School of Business, entrepreneurship as a phenomenon of interest was first launched in 1995 under the Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Growth.

During this early term, the Institute was led by Professor David Shaw, and later Professor Ken Hardy, both now Emeritus. The Institute's initial focus was to create case studies unique to entrepreneurship and family business, while teaching the core principles of business plan development. However, there were no dedicated faculty in Entrepreneurship.

In the early 2000s, Stewart Thornhill, a professor of Strategy, was able to entice Eric Morse, who at the time was teaching at the University of Victoria, to visit Ivey and look into the possibility of teaching entrepreneurship as the discipline’s first dedicated faculty member. Morse recalls meeting the late former dean Larry Tapp, who asked him to “create an entrepreneurship institute of note.”

Morse and Stewart proceeded to build curriculum, a faculty group around an academic discipline, and a vision for entrepreneurship at the School. One of the group’s earliest hires was David Simpson, MBA ’88, who was an experienced local entrepreneur. Simpson began teaching courses, such as Leading Family Business, and Entrepreneurial Finance (which remains the most popular entrepreneurship course at Ivey with more than 200 registrants each year). New Venture Creation, and Managing High Growth, along with the New Venture Project, formed the foundation of entrepreneurship education at Ivey.

The School's leadership had compiled an illustrious group of entrepreneurs to form the Institute’s Advisory Council in 1998. During Morse’s term, former Advisory Council Chairman David Anyon, MBA ’97, of Vintex Inc. proved instrumental in introducing Morse to Pierre Morrissette, MBA ’72, of Pelmorex Media.

“He was passionate about entrepreneurship from the first time I met him, maybe a little skeptical of what the School could do, but absolutely passionate about what the possibilities were going forward,” said Morse.

In 2006, Morrissette committed $2.5 million to entrepreneurship at Ivey. The funding also allowed the Institute to recruit some of the top academics from both sides of the Atlantic, creating bandwidth to provide more course offerings to students and entrepreneurs. In recognition and appreciation of the gift, the Institute was renamed the Pierre L. Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship. In 2010, Morrissette donated an additional $2-million gift and has continued to be a guiding presence of the Ivey Entrepreneurship Advisory Council.

The popularity of entrepreneurship has also extended opportunities with local high school programs, as well as the Ivey Summer Leadership program for high-achieving high school students.

With the recent establishment of the Western Accelerator, entrepreneurship has shown tremendous growth throughout Western University and its different faculties; and the Institute has played a significant leadership role in providing workshops, courses, and strategic direction.