One of the most dreaded aspects of being an entrepreneurship professor are the hundreds of times that students will come up with the same – bad – business concept when tasked with building businesses of their own. A perennial favorite is dog-walking services. Comes up every semester! Now, I don’t have a problem with dogs or dog walkers, just with a Columbia MBA deciding to put the degree to use in that occupation – doesn’t make much sense.
Of course, every so often a bright idea comes along that defies the common wisdom of the entrepreneurship professor. Just such an inspiration appears to have visited our colleagues over at the Kellogg School, as I read the following story from Business Week.
The lap of luxury
Quoting Business Week February 4, 2008 page 18:
Dogs of Chicago, rejoice. If your owner flies out of O’Hare International Airport, you can wait out the trip at a posh spot nearby-catching Animal Planet on a flat-screen TV and splashing in a dogbone-shaped pool. Paradise 4 Paws, a 24/7 “pet hotel,” will open a few miles from O’Hare on Mar. 1. The facility, which will also board cats, grew out of a 2005 entrepreneurship class at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. (Students modeled P4P after a popular pet hotel near Japan’s Kansai International Airport.) Customers will pay up to $75 a night for dogs and $35 for cats. Backers, who include Kellogg professors, plan to open a second P4P near Chicago’s Midway Airport by September, and 10 more across the country after that.