ENTREPRENEURSHIP FOR
HUMANITY
Kevin Oye ’79 is the executive director of the Tufts Gordon Institute, which fosters engineering leadership and provides venture opportunities through its Entrepreneurship Center. Professor Oye believes in business and technology for good. We spoke about what makes this possible, and teachable. BY ABIGAIL MCFEE ’17
What distinguishes the Tufts approach to entrepreneurship? At Tufts, we care more about developing the entrepreneurial mindset in all our students than teaching them just the mechanics of startups or measuring our success by the number of startups they launch. It’s more important to us that they discover how to find problems that matter, and develop the tools and agency to take action, risk failure, and persist even when challenged, knowing they can make a difference. We differentiate our approach to entrepreneurship in three ways: 1) Rather than just focus on generating startups, we aspire to give every Tufts student the opportunity to experience the entrepreneurial mindset… 2) We only hire faculty who have deep industry experience… and 3) We take a very practical, hands-on, not theoretical, approach to teaching entrepreneurship, immersing our students in doing, not just studying, venture launching. You graduated from Tufts yourself with a BS in electrical engineering and then eventually returned as a faculty member. Could you speak a bit about that journey? It takes more than an understanding of technology to drive a successful 12
technology business, especially during times of rapid change… Becoming a trusted leader requires humility, empathy, and a deep appreciation for the richness a diverse group can bring to a creative enterprise… It was at Tufts that I first began to realize this, when I took Jungian Interpretation of French Literature with Professor Seymour Simches. It was a remarkable class; through the lens of interpreting French literature with Jungian concepts, he conveyed the importance of seeing the uniqueness in every individual, and the importance of encouraging and nurturing that uniqueness…as the bedrock for continuing creativity in society, whether it be the arts, sciences, government, or business. Tufts engineers today are fortunate to have access not only to top engineering and liberal arts faculty, classes, and research, but also top entrepreneurial and business faculty with deep industry experience. Taking classes far afield from their technology roots increases the probability they’ll run into ideas and people they did not expect, which can be the sources of the deepest insights into oneself, other people, and the world we live in. By developing their people skills as well as technology skills, they’ll be more than great engineers,
