In February, Dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences Venkatesh "Venky" Narayanamurti announced a program to teach undergraduates about high-tech businesses--and how to start them.

It will fall under a new institute tentatively named the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH). Starting the institute signals a major shift in College policy, which currently prohibits students from running businesses in dorm rooms.

At Stanford, the five-year-old Mayfield program pairing selected students with mentors at technology companies has already drawn praise.

Narayanamurti says TECH is most similar to a center he helped start at the University of California at Santa Barbara. But he also notes that Stanford was the first school to teach entrepreneurship within the engineering school, rather than just in the business school.

"There are still relatively few engineering programs that teach entrepreneurship, though the need is clearly being recognized in leading schools," he wrote in an e-mail message.

While Narayanamurti has said TECH's aims are broader than to simply follow Stanford's lead, he has also said that Harvard has to catch up to other schools.

"Stanford has a culture where they encourage the high-tech students. That's new for Harvard," he said in February.

"In some ways, obviously, Harvard's had some very entrepreneurial students over the years, but on the other hand, emphasizing technology and entrepreneurship is not one of the things Harvard did. As a institution or a division, we did not nurture it the way Stanford did."