Fanning the Flames of Inspiration

Ian Grant, center, with students at the Peter T. Paul Entrepreneurship Center at the University of NH in Durham. Courtesy photo.

Realizing that not all great entrepreneurs emerge from business programs, three of the state’s largest universities and colleges are running entrepreneur centers. The idea is to engage students regardless of major and provide them with tools, work spaces and guidance to move an idea from concept to reality.

Established within the past few years, centers at the University of NH (UNH) and Plymouth State University (PSU) are connecting students to businesses in ways that provide greater interaction than a typical internship, and build real-world skills. Dartmouth College is investing $40 million in their center.

Not Just for Business Majors
In Durham, the Peter T. Paul Entrepreneurship Center at UNH, or ECenter for short, is in a commercial building downtown, intentionally set apart from the campus and not embedded within a particular school.

Executive Director Ian Grant says the ECenter focuses on ideas, innovation and entrepreneurship and brings students together from many disciplines. “We’re Switzerland,” Grant says. “Typically on a campus like ours, a French Lit major would probably never interact with an engineering student or a business major.  Bringing them together here creates interaction, which leads to teamwork. It is co-curricular.”

Marc Sedam, associate vice provost for innovation and new ventures, was the founding director of the ECenter and says it brings all of the pieces together. With a variety of creative spaces, offices for faculty and staff, and conversation areas, the entire design encourages interaction or, as he calls it, collision points.

The Cubex coworking area houses startups, and gathering spaces surrounding the offices encourage sharing. “It becomes a melting pot and really changes the approach with everyone sharing ideas and giving advice,” Sedam says. “A group of students might be discussing an idea, and someone will end up coming out to join the conversation.”  

The ECenter also has a meeting space and a maker space with a 3D printer, a CNC machine, electronic components and other tools to build prototypes. One of the most popular ECenter features is the Nitro Cold Brew coffee station, essential for extended brainstorming and a product of an ECenter student venture.  

Access to a Network of Support
Grant says they have brought in outside resources to provide, guidance and help with financing, and the ECenter has provided more than 200 hours of one-on-one coaching and helped students launch local businesses. He gives the example of Half-Acre Beekeeping in Newmarket. “This is a classic example of a student with an idea they were passionate about, and they worked on it here,” Grant says.

Partnerships with corporate sponsors also provide key resources. Raka Creative provides corporate identity packages, Pierce Atwood provides legal assistance for things like incorporation, and Catchfire Creative assists with websites. (All three firms are located in Portsmouth.)

The ECenter speaker series offers insight and exposure to professionals; the choice of speakers reminds students that entrepreneurs don’t come only from business and engineering schools.

The ECenter’s i2 Passport program rewards students with stamps for participating in on-campus activities that focus on ideas, innovation and entrepreneurship. They are then entered into a drawing. “Students also have a chance to win [a portion of] $25,000 to use for tuition or to pay off student loans. The possibility of winning the money really draws students in,” says Grant. The top prize is $10,000 and there are several lower-tier prizes too.

Sedam says students take advantage of the innovation challenge through the ECenter just “to see if they really might have something. The ideas are theirs; we just move them along and try to get them to the best and highest use.”  

The Entrepreneurship Call
At PSU, entrepreneurship is at the heart of the school’s new educational model, which uses seven integrated clusters that mix faculty and students from different majors and disciplines. According to PSU President Donald Birx, the integrated clusters were carefully chosen to build on the strengths of the university as well as the region. He says entrepreneurship is not really a business concept but a call to action and that those who learn to think entrepreneurially are more comfortable with risk and ambiguity and more willing to learn as they go.

Eric Spieth is executive director of the PSU Entrepreneurship Center, and in the vision statement he helped to craft, the language includes critical thinking, opportunity recognition, self-starting and solutions-based application of tools.

“We embedded an enterprising mind-set,” Spieth says. “So our students have much stronger global awareness about business issues, and they can add value to their employer and their clients.”

With a grant from Live Free and Start, Spieth created the Apex Accelerator, a nine-week series of four-hour seminars focused on rapid business optimization and new-venture creation. Existing businesses and startups are invited to take part.

The student counterpart is called the Apex Diamond, where Spieth will run the students through a version of the Accelerator so they will be using the same models, tools and language as the businesspeople they will be paired with.

“We have 4,200 undergraduates and close to 2,000 graduate students, plus all of our faculty and staff. Our idea is to take a combination of those populations and deploy them into businesses on-site or work with them on campus,” Spieth says. “There are also open labs on campus where a business or nonprofit can pose a question, a challenge they are facing, a problem they need solved.”

Spieth says they have worked with the communities of Lancaster, Lisbon, Littleton and Warren and plan on working with more. “The North Country is facing some extreme problems, including lack of industry and young people leaving,” he says. “We are going to take the Apex Accelerator on the road.”

Spieth says the most successful communities are the ones that are embracing change, and they are the best ones to work with. “We are starting to see the nascency or genesis of this change because everybody recognizes that unless we do something as a state, we are not going to be competitive,” he says.

Solutions That Make Cents
At PSU’s recent Enactus competition, which brings together students, business leaders and universities to create solutions for societal challenges, Spieth says he was amazed at what he saw and heard. “I think the current generation has this sense of altruism that is inherent to them; they realize that we have serious problems around the world that we cannot just ignore,” Spieth says. “Whether we are a business or an individual, we need
to participate.”

Bonnie Bechard, PSU business professor, says Enactus has big global goals, but at the same time, students are encouraged to try to solve community problems. “My team might be tackling a problem like homelessness, while also helping a small business to grow their revenue,” she says.

Bechard is leading two successful cluster projects: Panther Pitch (PSU’s version of the television show Shark Tank), and Climb Above Addiction. She says the campus-wide Panther Pitch allows students, alumni and businesses in the community the chance to win cash prizes and a spot in the Apex Accelerator program. “This has brought a lot of value to students, giving them the opportunity to pitch an idea and develop it,” Bechard says. “It has also drawn in students from outside the business majors.”

The Panther Pitch, above, allows students, alumni and local businesses the chance to win a spot in Plymouth State University's Apex Accelerator program. Courtesy photo.

For Climb Above Addiction, students partnered with the American Alpine Club and Plymouth House, a recovery center. Bechard says the project, which raised $7,000, introduces people in recovery to adventure therapy. “We want to challenge students to take on the most significant problems—so for New Hampshire we know that addiction is the biggest challenge. We also have a love of the outdoors.”

Another interactive teaching tool is Caring Scoops. Bechard says through a partnership with the Common Man restaurants, PSU students launched a brand of ice cream. The profits go to the Bridge House, a homeless and advocacy center for veterans in Plymouth.

Students are developing branding and packaging, creating a website, assisting with production and developing 14 new flavors. The venture is so successful, they must now decide if they want to build their own production facility on the university campus.

Dartmouth’s New “E” Venture
Dartmouth College in Hanover is establishing a center for entrepreneurship with a lead gift from Allison and Rick Magnuson, class of 1979. The Magnusons pledged $20 million to create the center, part of an overall $40 million investment to infuse entrepreneurship across the Dartmouth campus through endowed funding.

The college has also received 16 gifts of $1 million from a group of alumni leaders in technology, venture capital and private equity—creating the Dartmouth Founders Circle to help fund the center.

“The entrepreneurial spirit is flourishing throughout the Dartmouth community, as students and alumni make connections, forge brilliant ideas and transform concepts into exciting ventures,” says President Phil Hanlon.

In 2013, the college launched a four-year pilot project to expand the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network (DEN) and founded the DEN Innovation Center. Since its opening, it has incubated more than 100 ventures, awarded more than $400,000 in grants, matched and funded 30 start-up internships, and provided 300 hours of one-on-one mentorship.