American University
WASHINGTON – Professor William Bellows, a journalist turned business owner, likes being his own boss.
Bellows helps students do the same as the co-director of the Entrepreneurship Incubator at American University, along with professor Thomas White. He is also an Executive-in-Residence at American University’s Kogod School of Business.
He teaches classes on innovation, entrepreneurship and the introduction to business. “For almost every lesson he plans, he will change something at the last minute to improve it,” said Parthiban David, the head of the Management Department at Kogod.
David said that Bellows is “great at really connecting with his students.” Bellows currently is connecting with his students and helping their ideas flourish at American University’s Entrepreneurship Incubator.
At the Entrepreneurship Incubator, students come to Bellows and White with innovative product ideas and plans. Bellows and White hear out these ideas and do continuous “deep dives” in which they examine the product and give advice, ask questions and refine the product. If Bellows and White give the go ahead, the students get a grant of $1,500 for legal fees and to fulfill their business plan.
Bellows said, “It’s not about us, it’s about them. We are like coaches. When you get someone who is driven to achieve something and has the passion, the intelligence and the commitment, our job is to not get in their way.”
Rachel Koretsky, the founder of upace, was once an eager student at the Entrepreneurship Incubator. Koretsky’s burning passion for entrepreneurship came alive while she was in Bellow’s entrepreneurship class. She said Bellows made her “believe that I could start a company right out of college.”
Koretsky started her company upace in the Entrepreneurship Incubator with Bellows mentoring her every step of the way. She said that he “fostered real relationships within her team.” To this day she said she will “call Bellows almost once a month with questions and concerns that he always helps with.”
“I’m not letting him go,” said Koretsky.
However, Bellows has not always mentored and taught about innovation, at one time, he was an entrepreneur himself.
Before he took on that journey he had an entirely different dream: “to take down the corrupt people in government through journalism,” he said.
Bellows grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York. He went to Marist College School of Management in New York where he studied communication at the School of Communication and the Arts.
Upon graduation, he was placed at many small newspapers and never felt the fulfillment of covering hard hitting news that he was looking for. He later worked at IBM, but that this also didn’t feel right. Then Bellows met Dave Copithorne, and everything changed.
“Business is about solving problems,” said Bellows. “It is about finding a gap in the market place and filling it.” Bellows and Copithorne saw a gap and decided to fill it.
They created a company called Copithorne and Bellows in the mid- 1980’s. Their company consulted Fortune 500 and technology firms. Bellows said, “Our job was largely around communication. How do we take the words of high technology companies that weren’t resonate with consumers, at a time when the technology industry was just starting to move to the consumer? We consulted on strategy, positioning, language, communication and marketing.”
Bellows said, “We built this company over the next 15 years. We had companies all over the world and we were able to then sell the company to a big company in New York called Omnicom,” he said, adding that his past in journalism was the best preparation for starting his company.
Bellows said being a journalist “taught me how to see things objectively.” He said he can “see a situation for what it is and make judgements.” He said this has enabled him to “help students at the early stages begin to frame and shape the model of their company.” But, “they’re doing it and that’s the coolest part about this,” said Bellows.
Bellows ultimately views business as a way to make the world better. He said, “Nobody comes here [the Entrepreneurship Incubator] to make the world worse.”
Bellows said, “The Entrepreneurship Incubator is about figuring out what we can actively and practically do to make the world better. And that’s where I think business is such an undervalued tool. And it’s undervalued only if you don’t see business as solving people’s problems. If you see it as a means to make money, you misinterpret what the power of it is.”