Serendipity by Design: How Berkeley Systemically Fosters Entrepreneurial Success

When you visit the public university that created the highest number of venture-funded startups in the world, you expect it will not happen by chance. And yet, uncovering scientifically the hows and whys is as frustrating as ambitious; it’s elusive and somehow feels like magic, despite the tangible evidence. But these aren’t just academic questions – they cut to the heart of how Berkeley consistently turns ideas into action, and how entrepreneurial universities worldwide could “make it happen” as well.

On the flyer, the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (SCET) appears rather confident in their portfolio of entrepreneurship education programs: “We will make sure you will learn the mindset and behaviors that drive success”. And of course, that’s a catchphrase, but I can’t help but academically appreciate how specific is the expectation they set. Indeed, the reality is that we can nurture entrepreneurial capabilities, but the creation of solid startups is just a different and imperfect game. 

During the semester I spent at SCET, I was privileged to witness how they orchestrated their entrepreneurship education programs to impact the students. But throughout the entire period, I always felt like lingering around the White Rabbit hole, sniffing at the outline and occasionally sticking my head in to look deeper. Many students described their separate entrepreneurial journeys as “being thrown into the rapids of a whitewater and emerging with concrete opportunities”. Where does this success take shape? It is evident that the Berkeley brand and Silicon Valley play an important role, but in my narration and partial opinion I can already spoil that the most shared and culturally appropriate idea I gathered was that Berkeley makes it happen by “allowing for serendipity” – I will now take three different perspectives to unravel such magic.

Entrepreneurship Educators as Modern Heroes

The main focus of my research at SCET converged on the role of their educators in delivering effective entrepreneurship programs. Academically, the pedagogical landscape is divided into a more traditional education “about and for” entrepreneurship and a more recent education “through” entrepreneurship. The empirical observation is that entrepreneurship programs worldwide are increasingly blurring these boundaries, emphasizing the more general idea of deploying experiential and transformative learning journeys. As such, entrepreneurship education programs range from innovating on existing products through design thinking processes (challenge-based learning, CBL) to gamifying the creation of actual ventures (venture creation programs, VCPs); but the most prominent feature is the engagement of external actors like users, mentors, industry fellows, venture capitals etc. that challenge students to validate their learnings.  

SCET embodies such experiential entrepreneurship education in each course and summarizes it as the “Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship” (BMoE), highlighting the focus on the entrepreneurial mindset. The most straightforward example is the (BMoE) bootcamp that happens right before the beginning of the semester, where students and professionals work together for 5 days in learning-by-doing the fundamentals of venture creation. Then, the portfolio of programs varies, ranging from the horizontal Collider Labs, which offer different tracks for solving innovation challenges, to the more vertical courses like Technology Entrepreneurship or Startup Catalyst, which concretely support venture development, and other formats in the between like the Newton’s Lecture Series, which allow students to interact with distinguished innovators.

Modern entrepreneurship education appears difficult and it requires structures and frameworks of reference, but providing an experiential learning journey that includes all those external actors completely breaks the classroom’s fourth wall. Here, educators cannot be just teachers but must encompass many roles, such as facilitators, coordinators, project managers, or boundary spanners. Guess which other job has the same requirements? Well, one of SCET’s secrets is that most of its entrepreneurship educators are current entrepreneurs, and this works brilliantly, also because students appear to learn better from those who have already faced the hurdles of developing a startup. These people are passionate, competent, empathetic, independent, and able to manage the daily tensions of engaging multiple actors. “It is overwhelming unless you have already been a CEO for five startup companies… you learn to become very efficient, otherwise you can’t run a company.”  However, this comes with a price: you’re dealing with uniquely self-driven entrepreneurs, and sometimes they reverberate their personalities and beliefs into the entrepreneurship program. “I didn’t want to run or coordinate a course: I wanted to teach it my way. And my superior knows me well enough that he knows the best way to help me perform is to get out of the way and just let me do it.”.

Overall, when looking at the big picture of success as the number of student startups, we lack acknowledgement of how effective the entrepreneurship education programs are; in delivering experiential journeys, courses become projects or entrepreneurial ventures even, and success is a much more nuanced concept that is reinterpreted locally by each educator.

“What I really enjoy out of the classes is to take the ones that have potential but are hesitant, or don’t have the confidence, culturally or whatever, and get them to cross that line.”

“I believe a good class is where you’re a different person after taking it, and the best way to see if this is actually useful is if you have been able to apply some of these skills if you are actually activating some change for yourself and also outside.”

Bubbles of Microcosms

Throughout my interviews at SCET, entrepreneurship educators have shared how they developed their programs both as singular entities and as part of a collective entrepreneurship offering. This was central to understanding the idea of success: does the “make it happen” actualize in specific programs or is it a compounded effect along a longer journey? As far as I could tell, programs had very different origins and development journeys, but semester after semester SCET reassessed and increasingly glued them in an overall offering or portfolio. This usually happens in most universities, only with different dynamics and conditions; on the surface, one could not simply say that Berkeley’s current entrepreneurship offering is better than others.

Such an act of bricolage is a difficult endeavor as we need to ensure that programs work by themselves while designing how and if they connect to serve specific purposes. We need a strong sensibility to what happens within the single programs and how external initiatives can serve them best. Although the research I focus on states that we need to properly design entrepreneurship education programs, SCET purposely stayed out of the specific programs and only focused on serving them by building a platform. 

One example is represented by the challenge-based learning courses offered as “Collider Labs”, which are not developed by SCET itself. These courses belong to independent research entities working on separate topics like alternative meat or environmental disasters, and that thrive on a delicate internal balance between research and teaching. SCET offered to structure and gather some of their teaching activities under the umbrella of Collider Labs, and this resulted in a win-win situation where the research entities and SCET reciprocally enlarged their networks and entrepreneurship offerings. Another example is the Startup Semester, an international cohort of students who have the opportunity to navigate SCET’s offering of entrepreneurship courses and programs to develop their startup, catering additional network to the ecosystem.

Therefore, at SCET allowing for local development of the entrepreneurship education programs is extremely intentional and encouraged. Then, the Center is mainly focused on building two other things: a cultural North Star (the BMoE) and complimentary services. It is immediate to mention how its entrepreneurship offering serves and is served by other activities such as professional programs and global partnerships with other universities. Again, each of these activities developed as microcosms out of opportunity recognition (e.g. “we have a bunch of international friends”), but SCET has more control over them compared to the entrepreneurship education programs, which have to stay flexible by definition.

I will now enter the White Rabbit hole to start drafting my partial conclusion. I mentioned earlier that the local population, when faced with the straightforward question, just highlighted the idea of Berkeley allowing for serendipity. Which recursively clashes with the initial “make it happen” idea that I described; are we implying intentionality? The answer may lie somewhere in the middle: perhaps Berkeley doesn’t merely allow for serendipity, it designs for it.

SCET is explicit about this model that it calls the “Innovation Collider”, which translates to how the infrastructure and culture crafted at SCET and beyond lay down a fertile ground where unplanned collaborations between a multitude of actors are more likely to happen. Entrepreneurship educators, supported by SCET, play a pivotal role in nurturing and curating their local experiential educational journey, which converges towards the collider as a whole.

A Concrete Tool to Finally Stimulate Serendipity

Intentionally or not, micro-managing or not, the structure holds and SCET is centrally positioned to host hundreds of brilliant students in an intricate network of alumni, mentors, industry partners and investors, and other activities offered by other Berkeley departments. And still, is this the best configuration for university’s entrepreneurship centers worldwide? How did Berkeley as a whole manage to create all those venture-funded startups? We can see the beehive, but not the dance.

At one point it goes down to the people. Indeed, beyond the deliberate choice of hiring entrepreneurs, many have also recognized that SCET is just always able to choose competent and responsible people. Then, these people gather confidence and ownership of their programs, and to improve them semester after semester they put into practice feedback loops. Boldly enough, systemic serendipity originates from locally developed feedback loops.

“I have an expert team of teaching assistants that have taken this class and now have been through so many bootcamps that they can identify issues. They know what was magical for them, and now that they get to be the ones that deliver it, they just take the initiative – it’s really cool how they are raising the bar.” 

“We have a team of volunteer ambassadors, who are students with great energy who felt activated by our program and wanted to engage more. For me, they’re like my focus group of highly activated students, a listening group. So they table with me, participate in panels, interact with prospective students, produce graphics, and so on, but it’s on their volunteering time.”

Existing frameworks fall short of capturing the essence of such a multifaceted reality. There’s no business model, Berkeley brand, or Silicon Valley; serendipity is a happy accident delicately crafted as an outcome of myriad feedback mechanisms operating within Berkeley and SCET’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Feedback loops are just one bottom-up mechanism – listening, adapting, evolving -, but both practice and research must look at this level of granularity to be able to uncover how we can orchestrate the emergence of innovation and entrepreneurship in universities — how we make it happen.

“If I hear another framework, I’m gonna puke, because it’s not about frameworks; people write on all these papers about frameworks and stuff, but at the foundation, it’s empathy about everybody. It’s really about being there and being aware of the whole time.”