We sat down with Mark Simon, Director of the Hagerman Center at UM-Flint, to learn more about the great work they are doing both with students and the larger community.
Ecosystem: Can you tell us a little about UM-Flint’s Hagerman Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
It started in 2014 with an incredibly generous gift to University of Michigan-Flint’s (UM-Flint’s) School of Management (SOM). Phil Hagerman, who is President of The Hagerman Foundation and Co-owner of SkyPoint Ventures, donated two million dollars to foster entrepreneurship and innovation at the University. The Center supports and/or oversees several programs including scholarships for entrepreneurial students, awards for faculty promoting innovation in their classes and the community, UM-Flint’s student entrepreneurship club, a competition focused on creative solutions to problems, an interdisciplinary entrepreneurship speaker series and a summer entrepreneurship camp for high school students.
Ecosystem: What is the Center’s Mission?
The goal of the Hagerman Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation is to increase the University of Michigan-Flint community members’, including potential student enrollees, awareness of, and interest in, entrepreneurship and innovation. This will primarily be accomplished through entrepreneurial workshops, networking, programs, and events.
There are a couple of phrases within this mission that I want to emphasize. First, is “UM-Flint community members”. We want to involve everyone associated with UM-Flint, such as students studying the health sciences or social sciences. We also want faculty, staff, and administrators to participate in the Center’s activities.
The second phrase is increasing “awareness of, and interest, in entrepreneurship and innovation.” Our goal is to get everyone excited about innovation and entrepreneurship, especially those who might not have otherwise been thinking along these lines.
There is a saying that strategy is as much as what you don’t do as what you do. We don’t directly help launch ventures, we don’t directly provide in-depth knowledge of entrepreneurship and we don’t offer a wide range of resources entrepreneur needs. It might surprise you that I just said that. But there is a reason for it. There are other areas with UM-Flint and Genesee County that do a phenomenal job with those services. The entrepreneurial ecosystem here is, in my opinion, among the best in the nation. Our goal is to get people excited and then have take advantage of all that is available. We view ourselves as a feeder.
Ecosystem: Can you describe a program that captures your mission.
Sure. While they all do, let me discuss our flagship, Zillion Solutions. It is an entrepreneurship and innovation competition in which students suggest their idea for a new product or service that solves a problem. To initially enter, they just submit a very short simple PowerPoint or a minute or two selfie video. We don’t include concepts like financial forecasts, scalability or operations. We want to provide a very low barrier to entry and make the competition accessible to every student. We focus the first step in innovation, solving a problem, something all recognize as important.
We’ve set up separate divisions for each academic unit on campus, for example, STEM and the School of Education and Human Services. Each unit is guaranteed that roughly three to ten of their students will advance and receive prizes. Collectively, dozens of faculty, administrators and staff from every corner of campus have persuaded their students to enter.
This support and the competition’s structure leads to about 500 entries each year from across campus. We believe the competition has the highest participation rate among its students than that of any university innovation competition in the world. And if one needs further evidence the competition is interdisciplinary; last year nursing won first place; management, second; undecided majors, third and fine arts, fan favorite.
Our next step is to spread this and our others program to other interested academic institutions, especially those in or near Genesee County. Everyone should be interested in and excited about entrepreneurship and innovation.
For more information about Flint’s growing Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, find us on Facebook.
