Most startup companies begin with one big idea and, as a result, struggle to stay afloat, observed Helen Johnson-Leipold '78, head of Johnson Outdoors, a $400 million outdoor-products business under the S.C. Johnson umbrella.

But although her great-great-grandfather, Samuel C. Johnson, started S.C. Johnson just with wax for his parquet flooring, wax products now account for less than 1 percent of the multibillion-dollar company's revenues today, she said.

She was delivering the keynote address at the first Entrepreneurship@Cornell event March 30 in Alice Statler Auditorium. The event ran through April 2, attracting more than 200 alumni and friends from around the globe as well as scores of current Cornell MBA students and undergraduates. Entrepreneurship@Cornell, formerly known as Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise, connects Cornell students to universitywide entrepreneurial resources.

Johnson-Leipold screened a video clip in which her father, the late Samuel C. Johnson -- who was named for his great-grandfather -- reminisced about how Johnson Outdoors, a division he started, began to diversify by acquiring Old Town Canoe, a Maine manufacturer of classic canvas, wood and Fiberglas canoes. After a sneak peak at the company's experimental prototype for a molded plastic canoe, her father saw the future, and agreed to pay $1 million for Old Town to the owner, a crusty Mainer who hadn't wanted to sell.

"Dad bought Old Town and revolutionized an industry," said Johnson-Leipold. "He created the plastic boat market, which is a a half-billion-dollar market today," she said, noting how she learned from his style. "At Johnson Outdoors we provide structure and processes for everyone to be an entrepreneur every day. A great company can only be sustained by harnessing the power of everyone's ideas."

Johnson-Leipold described her father as "an intuitive entrepreneur." He had the vision to take the privately held, family-owned company into new businesses -- insect control, air care and home cleaning in addition to outdoor products -- that today are all billion-dollar companies.

She recounted how, as a teenager, she accompanied her father on trips to meet some of the "wacky entrepreneurs" whose companies he later bought and transformed into highly profitable enterprises. On one such visit, to a scuba diving equipment maker who preferred underwater ventures to venture capital, Johnson-Leipold told of how a plunge in the ocean was cut short when the equipment maker pulled playfully on a passing shark's tail and was promptly bitten in the arm. Back on the boat he doused his wounds, and the rest of himself, with Jack Daniels, she recalled.

Also part of Entrepreneurship@Cornell were a series of March 31 panels, "Capitalizing on Innovation," sponsored by the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Club and Net Impact, two student groups at the Johnson Graduate School of Management; a luncheon address by Stephen Golding, the Samuel W. Bodman Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration at Cornell; an expo on entrepreneurship at Cornell; a talk by alumnus Jeffrey P. Parker, founder of CCBN and FirstCall, at an event for members of the Cornell Entrepreneur Network, an alumni group, co-sponsored by the Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship; and a minicourse, Due Diligence in Private Equity Investments.