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Pepperdine Participates in National Entrepreneurship Week
National EntrepreneurshipWeek USA will run from Saturday, Feb. 24, to Saturday, Mar. 3. Launched by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation with additional sponsorship from the New York Times and Inc. magazine, the purpose of the week is to ignite the nation’s consciousness around the importance of being entrepreneurial.
During EntrepreneurshipWeek USA, thousands of activities will take place, ranging from high school competitions and academic gatherings to local town halls and a national policy summit in Washington, D.C. More than 700 organizations throughout the country have planned activities in all fifty states.
Pepperdine University is participating in its own Entrepreneurship Week which began on Feb. 21 with a special lecture by Josh Berman, co-founder and COO of MySpace.com, the leading Social Networking Life Style portal on the Internet with over 45 million users.
Previous to MySpace.com, Berman co-founded and managed two additional Internet companies, ResponseBase Marketing and Xdrive Technologies. At ResponseBase Marketing, Berman also held positions as COO and CFO. At Xdrive Technologies, in addition to being CFO, Berman was also senior vice president of corporate development.
The keynote speech for the special week was presented by John C. Bogle on Feb. 27 in the School of Law’s Caruso Auditorium. Bogle is the founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Group, the second largest mutual fund company in the world. Bogle is the author of several books including, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism; Character Counts: The Creation and Building of The Vanguard Group; and The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns.
In 2004, Bogle received the Institutional Investor’s lifetime achievement award and was named one of the world’s 100 most powerful and influential people by Time magazine. He was also named one of the investment industry’s four “Giants of the 20th Century” by Fortune magazine in 1999.
The week will end on Saturday, Mar. 3, with visiting assistant professor Elliot McGucken’s Hero’s Journey Entrepreneurship online lecture. McGucken’s dissertation on an artificial retina for the blind, titled Multiple Unit Artificial Retina Chipset to Benefit the Visually Impaired and Enhanced CMOS Phototransistors, won a Merrill Lynch Innovations Grant. He was awarded the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching as well as an honorary membership in the American Society of Physics Teachers.
McGucken launched the great books portal www.jollyroger.com in 1995 and runs over thirty Web sites devoted to topics ranging from physics, to Shakespeare and Artistic Entrepreneurship & Technology. He is the author of several books including the novel, Autumn Rangers.
