Forbes magazine has selected Belmont University professor Dr. Jeff Cornwall’s The Entrepreneurial Mind, a daily weblog about entrepreneurship and small business, as one of the “Best of the Web” among the myriad of blogs about small business. The magazine has posted its selections online at Forbes.com.
Dr. Cornwall, professor of management and director of Belmont University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, writes nearly every day on his blog about the opportunities and obstacles for entrepreneurs and about public policy issues that impact entrepreneurs, drawing on both his academic expertise and his experience of having founded and built a health care company. He also highlights entrepreneurial success stories and discusses entrepreneurship education. Dr. Cornwall launched his blog in September 2003.
Writing about Dr. Cornwall’s blog, Forbes said this:
Jeff Cornwall, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Nashville’s Belmont University, holds forth here on everything entrepreneurial. Posts are conveniently categorized by subject, like Entrepreneurial Myths (such as the “if only I had money” myth or the “entrepreneurs are gamblers” myth), Exit Planning and Learning from Mistakes. Under Ethics and Values, we found topics and links like “Is Bankruptcy Law Bad for Entrepreneurship?” and “Capitalism Meets Conservation.” Particularly deep: The Public Policy, Economics and Entrepreneurship click, with coverage of topics ranging from plans to fix the patent office to legislative issues like the impact of the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision, which allows the government to seize private property for “the greater community good.” There’s a charming dose of folksiness–Cornwall makes ample use of golf as a metaphor for operating a business–and links to posts by Belmont students involved in an entrepreneurship class that opened a used-CD store.
Cornwall’s daily postings reference a refreshingly broad range of media outlets, from national publications like Red Herring to national talk show hosts.
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Forbes review writer Lea Goldman said blogs were a natural for entrepreneurs. “What do blogs add to the small-business dialogue that a whole host of magazines, cable channels and Web sites don’t? In addition to transmitting news, industry gossip and occasional rants, the best small business blogs offer interactivity, allowing readers to chime into the dialogue with their own bright ideas. There are, unfortunately, too many small business blogs peddling the same prosaic resources you can get from a simple Google search. The better ones at least offer fresh insight on the mundane and first-hand accounts from the entrepreneurial front lines.”
In addition to his weblog Dr. Cornwall has published four books, has written op-eds for the Nashville Business Journal and The Tennessean, and is frequently quoted as an expert in various media on small business and entrepreneurship.
Center for Entrepreneurship
Belmont’s Center for Entrepreneurship offers a hands-on approach to help you hit the ground running, thanks to its co-curricular environment. Student entrepreneurs are given the opportunities to work in student-run retail spaces on campus or develop their own business ventures with the support of their professors. This hands-on approach equips students with the knowledge, skills and experience needed to be a successful entrepreneur.
