All of these programs and events are a huge step in the right direction. I personally did my best to even help some of these programs grow, particularly iFoundry and the group that eventually became Hack Illinois. But the biggest challenge I found was bridging the chasm between this hacker/entrepreneur culture and the existing academic/research culture.
As a premier research university, the UIUC engineering curriculum is heavily focused on the theoretical. In my years there, I really had to go out of my way to obtain some hands-on learning experiences. Those are so important for breeding a hacker/entrepreneur culture. It's how you learn to work with real-world constraints, how to network and collaborate, and how to fail well. A textbook and a Powerpoint lecture just can't teach that.
So the question I pose, to the author and to the readers, is this: How do we change the way students are taught?