Anyone can have a great business idea, and now students don’t have to be enrolled in the business school to get help making their ideas a success.
This semester, the business school’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship expanded its Innovation Fridays program to reach students of all majors. The program, which used to be advertised only to business school students, gives student entrepreneurs free consultations with successful business owners to get advice for starting their own small businesses, promoting social causes or creating new technology.
The program has expanded to different locations around the campus, with wider advertising and the capacity to serve many more students in a variety of fields, said Elana Fine, Dingman Center managing director.
Every Friday, students can pitch their ideas to an entrepreneur-in-residence and get feedback on how to improve that idea and turn it into something that can be marketed to consumers, said Alla Corey, program manager.
“These are successful entrepreneurs who’ve started businesses, built them and sold them,” Corey said. “They’ve all been there, done that.”
The program is run by the Dingman Center in partnership with the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute, the Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership and the Center for Social Value Creation.
Consultations are held on Fridays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in room 2113 in McKeldin Library, the Dingman Center Suite in Van Munching Hall and the Engineering Library Conference Room A.
Each week, about 10 to 15 students come to each location seeking advice for their businesses, which are usually geared toward a college-aged demographic, Fine said.
“So many students have great ideas; they just don’t know where to go with them,” Fine said. She added that students typically come up with ideas “relevant in their lives,” such as mobile applications for finding their way around the campus or a better method for advertising campus events.
“One of the tenets of entrepreneurship is trying to solve everyday problems,” said Harry Geller, an entrepreneur-in-residence.
For instance, at the beginning of each semester, many students typically come in with ideas of better ways to buy and sell textbooks, Geller said. And at the end of the year, when students are moving out of their dorms and apartments, ideas often center around selling old furniture or providing move-out services.
When students come to him with their ideas, Geller tries to help them create a first draft of their product that can be marketed and tested by consumers.
“Try to keep it simple,” he said. “Get a minimal, viable product out there; test it; see how it works.”
Lamar Rogers and Mohsen Farshneshani, senior government and politics majors, came to Innovation Fridays last week to seek advice for their new web service, PoliRoots.com, which helps campaigns run more efficiently by providing organizational tools and analytics to help track progress.
The nonpartisan product is designed to help campaigns target the small margin of undecided voters who can still be swayed one way or another in the days leading up to an election, Farshneshani said.
During the students’ consultation, they got advice about how to market and sell their product. Their next steps will be to find programmers to help them further develop their website and then start reaching out to campaigns, Rogers said.
Even though the state of the economy can seem dismal and the post-graduation job hunt daunting, there will always be a market for creative businesses, Fine said. With the program’s expansion this semester, more students will be able to access services to help them start these businesses, she said.
“There’s a lot of infrastructure, a lot of support systems for entrepreneurs,” she said. “If you have a good idea, it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur.”
