In 2013, a group of University of Michigan students wanted to support each other’s startup ventures. Some were tech focused, others social impact-oriented startups that needed time and financial backing to give them a chance to grow. “We spent time taking tests, writing papers, but hadn’t tried our hand at solving problems,” says Jeff Pituch, Associate Director for Social Innovation at Optimize. “We started Optimize as a program for early-stage ventures.”
Legend has it that if you sit still long enough in the ITHAKA/JSTOR kitchen attending Orchestructure meetings, every person you ever wanted to meet will walk through the door. Okay, well, maybe almost every person. Jeff Sica is a senior database administrator at the University of Michigan through Advanced Research Computing Technology Services or ARC-TS…
When students search for jobs as assistants in research labs, the process is awkward and disorganized. Most labs only post high-level overviews of their research online, so it can be difficult to connect with the right opportunity and find a lab or researcher that wants to take on students, not to mention knowing whether the…
You know someone’s a born entrepreneur when they’re 22 years old, graduating from the University of Michigan, and on their fourth venture. Peter Michaelides started his first business renting out parking lots for U of M football games at 11 years old, and the bug bit him for life. Now he’s heading off to Santa…
In our recent two-part series on the student entrepreneurs of the University of Michigan at the TechArb accelerator and Innovation in Action program, we profiled a young entrepreneur named Scarlett Ong Rui Chern and her venture called Peerstachio. One of the things that struck me as I interviewed Chern was the sheer number of grants she had managed to wrangle to keep her venture afloat, and the amount of support she had received from TechTown and the University of Michigan programs and departments dedicated to supporting student entrepreneurs. “There are so many resources at U of M,” Chern tells me, “we really have the upper hand.”
Jeni Olney’s role at the University of Michigan is to get students excited and interested in entrepreneurship, to be exposed to the idea of entrepreneurship as a useful skill set and a valuable degree. “Then, once I get them into classes, my job is to connect them to resources,” Olney says. This is Innovate Blue, the University of Michigan’s program for connecting any and all undergraduate students with the option of a minor in entrepreneurship.
