Katherine Olives
At the Zahn Center we believe that entrepreneurship is a mindset, and that everyone has the mindset within them. Each person has the ability to question the status quo, create change, and adapt with creativity and innovation. Being an entrepreneur, to us, means that you're never satisfied, and you're always fighting to make this world a better place for all.
But this entrepreneurial mindset must be cultivated in an environment that supports questioning and creativity. That's why we were so excited to have worked with so many professors in a variety of different disciplines this semester! Students at CCNY were able to explore the concept of entrepreneurship as it relates to business, design, social impact, gender studies, and engineering, and we think many of them caught the bug.
Professor Punit Arora's Entrepreneurship class spent the semester exploring what it means to turn your dreams into a sustainable venture. His class worked in groups to create business plans for a variety of different projects. All of the students in this class applied to our venture competitions with these final projects, and a few groups made it into our final 28. One of these teams is working to verify counterfeit drugs.
The Zahn Center sponsored a course in the Electronic Design and Multimedia program for the second year to help designers explore the path of entrepreneurship. Adjunct Professor Yvette Francis taught the course this Fall, in which students developed their startup ideas, explored the design and technical elements of each, and conducted extensive research on their innovation and market.
Professor Anasa Scott exposed CCNY students to the world of social impact in her environmental social entrepreneurship course this semester. Students explored how entrepreneurship and business can create social change. It's no surprise that so many of our entries this year had a social aspect to them, and so many of our students were thinking globally about issues.
This semester, as part of our partnership with Standard Chartered Bank, we hired Kim Wales to expose CCNY students to entrepreneurship with a gender and diversity lens. Her students learned about the history of women's entrepreneurship and explored what it means to be a female entrepreneur today. As a semester-long project, her students created a business plan and presented it as a final. Several students applied to our venture competitions with these projects, including an online platform to help parents babysit for each other and a social entrepreneurship enterprise for coffee farmers.
We are so excited that so many students not only explored what it means to have an entrepreneurial mindset, and that so many of them caught the entrepreneurship bug and decided to pursue their ideas and dreams as ventures. We hope that CCNY students incorporate this kind of innovative thinking into their entire lives, so we partnered with Engineering 101 classes to bring design-thinking and ideation into their classrooms. We brought in Gareth Miles of the Rise Group, who led ideation workshops for the last few weeks of the semester. Students gained valuable skills, and we hope they continue to think creatively, ask questions, and come up with positive solutions.