New entrepreneurship dean eager to steer ‘high-performance’ school
- Drew Sterwald
- October 3, 2024
- Faculty and Staff
- Contributors: James Greco | Photos
5 – minute read
Just a week and two days after moving into the dean’s office of the Daveler & Kauanui School of Entrepreneurship, William McDowell was already extolling Florida Gulf Coast University’s fertile atmosphere of collegiality and collaboration.
“I’m meeting such great folks,” he said in an early August chat, settling into a comfortable chair in the lounge-like Lucas Hall lobby and telling visitors to call him Bill. “There are so many fabulous individuals with a lot of passion for everything that they do. And there’s so much interconnectedness, so much potential for collaboration — which is really very exciting.”
McDowell gestured across the room toward the new Ain Technology and Design Hub, where students studying entrepreneurship, digital design, software engineering or other fields collaborate with business clients from the community on projects like website design and strategic marketing. The workspace was made possible by a $2 million gift from Mark Ain, founder and retired CEO of Kronos Inc., a multibillion-dollar corporation that provides human resource, payroll and workforce management solutions. The gift also established the endowed chair McDowell holds.
“That hub is the kind of thing the community wants to see,” he said. “Here’s how we’re bringing together all these disciplines for the benefit of the students and the community, especially the business community.”
Interdisciplinary collaboration is a subject McDowell mentions often and enthusiastically in conversation. Successful entrepreneurs should not only be able to discover problems and opportunities where they can innovate solutions, he said. They also need to understand how to pull together resources from a variety of places to make those solutions work.
Among the cadre of educators teaching these enterprising skills across the country, the Daveler & Kauanui school already has an established reputation for programs built by founding director Sandra Kauanui, according to McDowell. When he learned about the opportunity to become the school’s next leader, he leapt at the chance.
“The foundation is here, already doing amazing things,” he said. “Why would I not be interested in stepping into, honestly, a high-performance sports car, and saying, ‘I want to drive that’ and ‘how can we move that forward?’”
A Houston native, McDowell most recently served as an endowed professor and management department chair at Texas State University. He brings a diverse portfolio of experience in private business, angel investing, executive coaching, teaching and published scholarship to FGCU. After founding two companies, he went to school to learn more about business, enhancing his bachelor’s degree with an MBA and a management doctorate. Along the way, he discovered a passion for teaching.
“In management at that time, there really weren’t a lot of entrepreneurship degrees or Ph.D.s,” he recalls. “I became an entrepreneurship professor at my first university and started really getting excited about it.”
Throughout the course of his career at five universities, McDowell has taught at graduate and undergraduate levels in management and entrepreneurship. He has developed degree programs, minors and certificates in entrepreneurship, leadership and decision-making. He has steered development of noncredit and co-curricular programs that engaged hundreds of students from diverse majors.
McDowell’s experience ranges from large public universities like Texas State to smaller private institutions like Bradley University. At Bradley, he led the Turner School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, among the first stand-alone entrepreneurship schools in the nation.
Like Turner, FGCU’s entrepreneurship school operates as an independent entity within the university — and that’s a major selling point to McDowell.
“It’s not a department. It’s not a center. It’s not a program. It’s a school. It’s one of the major units of this campus that’s promoted by the university. Everybody sees this as an integral part of what FGCU is,” he said.
“That means we have the ability to truly connect with all the different parts of the campus — the STEM programs, arts and sciences. Of course we have entrepreneurship majors and digital media design majors in the school, but we also connect with all these other students who are extremely creative or have fabulous ideas that they want to be able to do something with. They need an outlet, and we have that here.”
Furthermore, having a dedicated building for entrepreneurship demonstrates the university’s commitment to the school’s programs, he said. It’s a magnet attracting talented alumni and other successful businesspeople in the region to campus to share their insights and experience with the next generation of aspiring entrepreneurs.
“There are a lot of really cool things happening in this region we have access to, a lot of innovation and development,” McDowell said. “Some of the top minds and entrepreneurs in the world are right here. All this is kind of coalescing around this fabulous idea of how we can better educate our students.”
Eager to shift the “high-performance sports car” into high gear, McDowell has already been meeting with members of the school’s advisory board, which includes successful real estate developers, financial executives and startup presidents.
“These are men and women who have been there, done that,” he said. “Integrating them into the life of the school is vital for growth and, honestly, for some of the best ideas on where we need to go.”