Dr. Kline, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield, gave two CEE-sponsored talks this month at Rockford College. Here is Stephen Hicks’s interview with him on Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume:

Dr. Kline, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield, gave two talks this month at Rockford College. Here is Stephen Hicks’s interview with him on the main points of his talk on business ethics:

The talk was sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship.

Forthcoming: Our interview Professor Kline on David Hume, who, according to a recent vote by contemporary philosophers, is the most influential dead philosopher.

Judy Estrin, CEO of JLabs, is the co-founder of seven technology companies.  She was the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000 and has served on the boards of Rockwell and Sun Microsystems. Currently, she is on the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney Company and FedEx, the advisory board of Stanford’s School of Engineering and Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board. Most recently, she is the author of Closing the Innovation Gap (McGraw-Hill, 2008). We met with Ms. Estrin in Menlo Park, California to explore her thoughts on educating and managing for entrepreneurship and innovation.

Kaizen: What was it like growing up in a high-powered science-and-engineering family?

Estrin: That’s hard to answer because I don’t know anything but growing up steeped in science. A lot of the trips we took during the summer were to academic scientific conferences throughout the world. As I talk about in the preface of Closing the Innovation Gap, it wasn’t just that my parents were both academics, but both were Ph.D.s in electrical engineering — it was quite rare at the time for a woman to have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. And so I just grew up in an environment where I was surrounded by academics and scientists.

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In a recent Forbes article, Sramana Mitra asks whether business schools that emphasize raising venture capital over bootstrapping set up their students for failure in the “real world.” First-time entrepreneurs typically don’t have the track record necessary to secure venture capital, so if they see it as their only option they may never get their business off the ground. It’s a testament to CEE Professor Jeff Fahrenwald’s Entrepreneurship course that bootstrapping and venture capital are both given equal consideration as appropriate funding tactics.

Read the article at Forbes.

Congratulations to Khetsiwe Dlamini, who was the subject of an article the Rockford Register Star this week for her leadership in the Rockford College Student Government. Khetsiwe also made her mark in Dr. Stephen Hicks’s Entrepreneurship and Ethics course, in which she gave an excellent presentation of her case study on the entrepreneur Richard Branson. Watch a short video clip from her presentation here. Additionally, Khetsiwe was featured in the April 2009 issue of Kaizen.

Read the article at the Rockford Register Star.