Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

From the Georgia Institute of Technology:

ManTech, a 54-year-old company that provides mission-focused technology solutions and services for U.S. defense, intelligence, and federal civilian agencies, is partnering with the Atlanta institution on a program to help entrepreneurs develop innovative, disruptive solutions that target and resolve federal agencies’ most pressing and difficult challenges.

The work is being undertaken with Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) and its Cyber and Emerging Technologies Program. ATDC is the Peach State’s technology incubator, working with entrepreneurs to build, scale, and launch successful technology companies.

Several news items out of the Greensboro-based school.

• The institution has landed a $5.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a genomics educational hub that will provide new educational and research opportunities for undergraduate and master’s students who are historically underrepresented in biomedical sciences. According to an article in WRAL TechWire, the Genomics Research and Data Science Center for Computation and Cloud Computing (GRADS-4C) will be based at A&T and will anchor a community of institutions – including Shaw University, Winston-Salem State University and North Carolina Central University.
• Also, the university has appointed Sean Johnson as Professor and Director of its Center of Excellence in Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CEE&I). The selection of the former Senior Project Manager in the Workforce Development Center at Cincinnati State Technical & Community College comes after a national search. In his last position, Johnson launched and led the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business initiative, providing access to education, capital, and a network for entrepreneurs seeking to scale their businesses. CEE&I is an interdisciplinary community advancing A&T’s entrepreneurial capacity by providing exemplary entrepreneurship education, cutting-edge research, results-oriented acceleration and incubation program, and an impact-driven community and corporate engagement program. It accepts students, faculty and staff across all disciplines and is open for business and collaboration.

From the University of Arkansas:

Two organizations at the Fayetteville-based university have joined forces to launch the Master of Science in Product Innovation (M.S.P.I.), welcoming the first class this fall. The collaborators are the Department of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Venture Innovation in the Sam M. Walton College of Business and the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

The new program prepares students to develop new physical and digital products and assists them through the cycle of creation, management, promotion and manufacturing. It was created to appeal to both entrepreneurs and professionals in existing companies to revise and enhance products or roll out new ones.

Tailored for early to mid-level working professionals, the M.S.P.I. program is offered in a part-time format spanning a two-year period beginning each fall semester. The program incorporates 30 credit hours through full summer, fall and spring terms. Classes meet online during the week and one Saturday per month at the University’s Global Campus in Bentonville.

From Cornell University:

Twenty-eight student teams have been selected to participate in the fall cohort of eLab, Cornell’s student start-up accelerator. This marked the accelerator’s most competitive application cycle to date, with 75 student founders vying for a place in the program.

Welcoming its 10^th credit-bearing cohort, eLab accepts student founders from any field of study across Cornell and trains them to launch real businesses. Established in 2008 by the Student Agencies Foundation and Entrepreneurship at Cornell, many eLab alumni have flourished following their graduation from the program, including Eversound, which recently announced its acquisition by digital engagement technology leader Uniguest. eLab is administered by the Center for Regional Economic Advancement, a division of Cornell Research and Innovation.

eLab teams undergo intensive entrepreneurship bootcamps, conduct customer discovery interviews, fine-tune their business plans and connect with a network of successful Cornell alumni, all while earning college credit from the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.

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