ANN ARBOR – Jeff Zhang, an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the School of Information, also is an entrepreneur. He’s mentored by Nancy Benovich Gilby, the school’s Ehrenberg Director of Entrepreneurship, a serial entrepreneur herself who has guided eight companies over her career to successful exits.

Zhang is developing a project that comes straight from his heart – an off-line rewards system for on-line gamers. But he admits to having neither a technical nor an entrepreneurial background.  So he gladly accepts the very pointed feedback provided by Benovich Gilby.

“I welcome the fact that she rips apart my ideas in a constructive way,” Zhang said. “She has a wealth of experience she draws on when she’s talking to us. The classroom setting takes an entrepreneurial approach interweaving her experience into the mix. Our sessions are interactive, rather than just another lecture.”

Exactly what the U-M was looking for when School of Information Dean Jeffrey MacKie-Mason hired her in 2014. Benovich Gilby helped develop the school’s entrepreneurial curriculum for the just announced Bachelor of Science in Information degree. Benovich Gilby also is coordinating entrepreneurial partnerships with other departments and schools at the university, plus expanding the school’s participation in events such as national competitions, startup treks, networking opportunities and client engagements.

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Benovich Gilby certainly has the resume to pull it off. She has been involved in major roles in information technology companies since 1987, including Apollo Computer, Firefly Network, Component Software, Wildfire, ON Technology, Asurion Mobile Applications, and A20 Mobile. She has also played leadership roles in ten companies that resulted in eight exits, or outcomes that resulted in a return to the original investors and shareholders.

In her spare time, she also coaches FIRST Robotics competitors for 5-18 year olds, an organization founded by insulin pump and Segway inventor Dean Kamen. What’s more, she has been working with the Zell Lurie Institute at the Ross School of Business and the Engineering School Center for Entrepreneurship for the past seven years.

She also has strong ties to the U-M, including a Bachelor’s of Science in Engineering and a Master’s of Science in Engineering, with a major in computer engineering. In 2007 she received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the department of Computer Science and Engineering.

During her U-M student days, she played trumpet in the Marching Band and proudly pointed out during an interview with MITechNews.Com Editor Mike Brennan that she was with the band when it played at two Rose Bowl games.

Her director of entrepreneurship position was gifted from Roger and Carin Ehrenberg. Roger is the founder and managing partner of IA Ventures, a New York-based Venture Capital firm, and a member of the UMSI External Advisory Board as well as the UMSI Campaign Council.

“Nancy’s appointment reinforces UMSI’s commitment to entrepreneurship,” Roger Ehrenberg said. “She is a successful entrepreneur and startup executive with experience in engineering, product leadership and general management.”

Just high praise comes from someone who only met Benovich Gilby when she was one of dozens of candidates who applied for the post.

“I was really excited about finding someone with the right entrepreneurial experience, not just an academic or someone who came from a large company,” Ehrenberg said. “She is someone who could help build companies. She brings a level of empathy and insight others wouldn’t have.”

When asked how he would grade her performance during her first year on the job, Ehrenberg said he gives her an “A.” He added: “She has put entrepreneurship on the map at the University of Michigan. She keeps her focus on students to give them the best training possible.”

She also gets strong marks from professionals who have worked with her in her entrepreneurial past. Peter Feinberg served under Benovich Gilby as vice president of engineering at California start-up Lumitrend, a mobile software development company that provided the first commercially available solutions to automatically and wirelessly backup a user’s cell phone data. The company was acquired in 2006 by Asurion, a cell phone insurance company that works with AT&T, Verizon and others.

“She’s an amazing person,” Feinberg said. “She’s on top of everything. She has so much experience in the industry. Any time an idea needed fixing, she had great ways to improve it. When Nancy left Lumitrend after it was sold and took an executive position at A2O Mobile, I went with her there.”

Feinberg said she’s always talked about wanting to give back to other entrepreneurs. When she told him about the U-M gig, he told her it was a great fit. But he added that if Benovich Gilby called and asked him to join her on another start-up, “I would do it at the drop of a hat. I know anything we would do would be a success.”

The students have responded well to Benovich Gilby’s tough-love guidance. Heather Newman, the director of marketing and communications for UMSI, said the front room at the UMSI Engagement Center is always crammed with her students seeking her advice and guidance. Perhaps the biggest student of them all is Benovich Gilby, who, Newman said, has blended well into the college culture.

“She’s become a catalyst for people working with each other,” Newman said. “Nancy has made entrepreneurship a front-and-center priority for the school. I attribute this to Nancy’s history, nature and dynamic personality. When people get successful, they often disengage with students. Her day-to-day mentoring is unique.”

Newman said Benovich Gilby has been the key to making connections with the other U-M schools that also have entrepreneurship programs. Recently, she led the charge to pair up students from the School of Information with the U-M School of Public Health, what Newman described as a first for UMSI.

Graduate student Michael Collins said Benovich Gilby helped him hone his project, an on-line recruitment platform for companies to help them find IT professionals through referrals. He said she provided him with invaluable advice on how to position his company, and how to pitch it to potential investors.

“She helped us with the discovery process,” Collins said. “She gives you a process where you sample potential users of your product. She teaches you how to extract the good data you need…and how to understand the target market. She’s a true go-getter with high energy in entrepreneurship and making sure students succeed.”

This chance to help students is what drew Benovich Gilby back to the University of Michigan.

“I’m here because I want to make an impact,” she said. “I’m drawn to the types of open minded very passionate, no barriers, anything can be done type of attitudes. Passion combined with these can-do attitudes I find very attractive. You can find a lot of that here.”

You typically find Benovich Gilby at a booth in the UMSI Engagement Center on central campus with her trusty dog, Duchess. She’s training Duchess to work with her 9 year-old daughter who has diabetes. Duchess can smell when blood-sugar levels spike, she said. The students and staff have dubbed Duchess the “First Dog of Michigan.”

Benovich Gilby also has an 18-year old son who is attending college in San Mateo, California, where she had been based on her last start-up. She’s been married to Joe Gilby for the past 25 years. He studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University, then got swept up in 3D graphics, which lead him to the world of animation and gaming. Gilby stepped back from the tech industry several years ago and now mentors, angel invests and develops his own ideas, his wife said.

What’s it like for an entrepreneur to work in a large bureaucracy that is at the core of all major universities like Michigan? Not bad, so far. Because UMSI is smaller and newer than the 18 other schools at Michigan, it doesn’t have many of the longer-term institutional issues to deal with, she said. At the School of Information, each professor is like a CEO, she said. Autonomy appeals to her entrepreneurial instincts.

What she also likes is how the Makers Movement has become intertwined with UMSI. The Makers Movement features entrepreneurs with an interest in engineering-oriented pursuits such as electronics, robotics, 3-D printing and the use of CNC tools, as well as more traditional activities like metalworking, woodworking and traditional arts and crafts.

Making and prototyping products is part of what Benovich Gilby wants to impart at UMSI. She’s been teaching a crash course in design thinking. Students design a project, ideate and sketch the solution. Prototypes are made with pipe cleaners and popsicles sticks.

“A large part of our model is we want to teach and have students learn about how to use information to build a better world,” Benovich Gilby said. “It attracts a different type of faculty and student.”

Her goal is to push entrepreneurship so that U-M becomes a center for entrepreneurism – a skill set that matches the passions of today’s millennial students who want to create, innovate and better the world in which they live.

“I want to make sure students are supported here to gain those open-ended skills,” she said. “I would like every student to pursue their own passion-led, self-directed innovation project and have that on their transcript. If we were the first university to do that, we would blow away all of our objectives.”

Mike Brennan is Editor and Publisher of MITechNews.Com, a news portal site he created 16 years ago. He also is co-host of M2 TechCast, an Internet radio show that airs each Monday at 3 pm on the PodcastDetroit network.