Milwaukee Community Journal – Is the solution to joblessness among veterans, entrepreneurship? Career experts think so. According to the Small Business Administration, military veterans are almost twice as likely as non-veterans to start their own business, but their unemployment rate stands at 6.7 percent as of February, and has been consistently higher than the national average.
Entrepreneurship
Accelerate UConn Program Launches
UConn Launches Program to Help Students, Faculty Transform Ideas for Technology into Commercialized Products
New Haven Register – The University of Connecticut is launching a program to help students and faculty transform ideas for technology into commercialized products. The school kicked of its Accelerate UConn program with a ceremony Tuesday in Storrs. The program, which builds upon UConn’s existing technology transfer, incubation and commercialization infrastructure, is being funded by a three-year, $300,000 grant by the national science foundation.
Accelerate UConn Program Launches in Groton
The Day.com – University professors and their students have plenty of ideas for new technologies but no formal launching pad from which to shoot them skyward.
And that’s where the new Accelerate UConn program comes in, taking a different tack in promoting much-needed entrepreneurship throughout the state, officials said Monday during a meeting with professors and administrators at the University of Connecticut at Avery Point. It was the first in a series of meetings to be held at UConn campuses throughout the state to announce the program.
UConn to kick off ‘Accelerate’ program
After Guatemala
Since we have returned from Guatemala our project has gone from a project to a passionate pursuit, a fire has been ignited within us. Before our trip Dr. Lisa Eaton told us that we had to ‘get our feet wet’ and bring Parrot MD to an impoverished country. We didn’t realize how important this advice was until we were in a small village seeing firsthand the problem and how useful our device can be. There’s a lot to be said for sitting and planning out details but at one point you have to be there to fully understand what needs to be done.Continue Reading
Folta Serves as Guest Editor
Management Professor Timothy Folta, the Thomas John and Bette Wolff Chair of Strategic Entrepreneurship at the School of Business, is serving as editor of a special issue of the Journal of Advances in Strategic Management. Papers may be submitted until May 15. Research finalists will be invited to attend a conference at the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study in Strasbourg, France in November. Folta, an award-winning researcher, is a Fellow of the Institute, which was created in 2012 as a place of intellectual innovation.
The Final Applications Are In
The final applications are in. The iQ judges will be sifting through over 50 applications to find the top 16 innovations. Those winners will then be asked to give presentations on their ideas, and eight of them will be invited to iQ’s summer incubator. The top three get prizes of $15,000, $10,000, and $5,000.
In the past few workshops, iQ focused on understanding innovation and commercial potential of products. Innovation can be defined as an invention plus its distribution. The invention itself needs to bring something to the market that is different than what is already out there. As Professor Rich Dino would say, how is it cheaper, better, or faster? Continue Reading
The Parrot Is Guatemala Bound!
We’re only a few days away from being on the plane to Guatemala! Charles and I just finished assembling and packing up the Parrot devices that we will be bringing down to the clinic in San Antonio, Guatemala. Partners in Development (PID) has already spread the word throughout the community that we will be visiting, and a medical clinic will be set up between March 1st and the 8th, so everyone in need of general healthcare can come to the clinic.Continue Reading
Have a Million Dollar Idea?
Have a million dollar idea? You can now get an opportunity to turn that idea into a reality through UConn’s Innovation Quest (iQ) competition. On February 16th the first iQ seminar kicked off and the attendance was bigger than we’ve ever seen. Students interested in joining still can as there are two iQ workshop seminars left on March 9th and March 23rd before a final application is due on March 30th. In these workshops students are able to learn tips on starting a business. They focus on key entrepreneurial skills that allow students to develop their ideas and think about the future of their product. There are also a number of experienced entrepreneurs that act as personal mentors to students.Continue Reading
UConn’s New Parrot Device Start Up
How can you get illiterate people to follow written prescription directions? That’s the big question I tried answering after returning from Ghana in May 2013. After working in a medical clinic for a week, our team noticed that patients were not following their dosage instructions. The illiterate patients couldn’t read the medication labels we were giving them. Since they couldn’t understand these labels, the patients were Continue Reading