Harvard Wants The Next Zuckerberg To Stay At Harvard

Harvard University has teamed up with an organization called the New Enterprise Associates to create an initiative that hopes to keep great innovators in college before they run out and make millions. This, of course, is exactly what happened with Mark Zuckerberg and fellow software architect Bill Gates. The problem is all the good schools are in New England but all the dough is out on the West Coast. But no more, perhaps.

The new initiative is called the Experiment Fund, and it will award amounts of $250,000 to $500,000 to as many as six start-ups in the brainy Massachusetts area that houses Hardvard and MIT, among many others. While anyone is eligible it was Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences dean Cherry Murray who co-founded the project.

New Enterprise Associates's Patrick Chung, a venture capitalist, was quoted as saying, "There has been an envy of the left coast. Now, these talented engineers don't have to leave when they reach the boundaries of the university where the ideas are formed ... They can walk right out of class and into a place that can make those start-ups real." Then again, if you watched The Social Network, you know there's a lot of reasons to go to Silicon Valley aside from the fact that you might get a bit of funding. Nevertheless, it's always nice to see initiatives that promote enterprising start-ups.

[via All Things D]