Farley Center for Entrepreneurship Builds Relationships with Entrepreneurs in Home Security

LiveWatch Security, LLC, moved its fast growing home security systems business to Evanston in 2011 because of the city’s proximity to one of the premier thought leadership centers in the country: Northwestern University. Two Northwestern University Alumni formed a perfect team to bridge academia and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University to an Evanston business.

According to LiveWatch Security CEO, Brad Morehead, “While many leading Universities graduate top tier talent, few can match Northwestern’s multi-disciplinary collaboration and innovation that Professor Michael Marasco has created at the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship. Students at Northwestern University with a variety of backgrounds can experience the entire innovation and business life cycle from idea generation, development, launch and fundraising. Courses like NUvention Web train engineers, computer science majors and graduate business students together to gain real world experience rarely seen in a university setting.”

LiveWatch saw the talent that the Farley Center was developing and began an informal internship program working with a group of students active at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. Projects began as collaborative ideas between the company and the student interns. In several cases, these projects progressed quickly to longer-term success stories. Today, LiveWatch Security is actively working with six Northwestern University students, most of whom developed their talents through Professor Michael Marasco’s NUvention Web class.

Externship opportunities like this give students a chance to showcase what they have learned in the classroom by working with companies like LiveWatch Security’s SafeMart.com, the country’s fastest growing provider of wireless security systems and alarm monitoring.

LiveWatch Security and The Farley Center for Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University are creating an environment where students, the university, customers and entrepreneurs can all benefit. Students are incubating innovative concepts while LiveWatch Security is leading a $20 billion home security industry revolution using ground-breaking ideas and technologies developed in collaboration with Northwestern University’s outstanding future alumni.

 

Entrepreneurship at Northwestern

Entrepreneurship is everywhere. A recent Business Week article titled ‘Startup Fever: College Students Have It Bad’ talks about the boom in entrepreneurship in college campuses around the country.

Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., added six more undergraduate classes in entrepreneurship in the past three years (for a total of eight) in response to student demand, says Michael Marasco, director of Northwestern’s Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

The Farley Center has pioneered a series of innovative interdisciplinary courses called NUvention in different verticals — Medical focuses on medical innovations, Web on web-based businesses and Energy on energy and sustainability projects. These classes help students go from idea to conception to the actual launch of the businesses.

For the complete Business Week article, click here.