Florida Atlantic: Innovating the Future

Florida Atlantic University senior John Thomerson's journey with entrepreneurship started three years ago. When an email inviting students to attend an upcoming entrepreneur boot camp landed in his inbox, curiosity got the best of him. How could the camp help with his business idea? So he signed up to participate.

"I saw this email and thought, 'Why not take advantage of what it has to offer?'" Thomerson said. "The bootcamp covered everything I needed to know as a budding entrepreneur from how to build out a business, create a pitch deck, and having a realistic business plan."

Fast forward to today, and Thomerson is getting ready to graduate with $56,000 in non-diluted funding for his patent-pending pet health care venture, Potty Pal, along with a broad networking base fostered by the years he has spent in Florida Atlantic's entrepreneurial ecosystem. Potty Pal was inspired by Thomerson's wirehaired terrier, Daisy, who suffered from hind-quarters paralysis. The Potty Pal device provides support to help dogs with similar challenges relieve themselves.

"Everything with the entrepreneurship program exceeded my expectations," Thomerson said. "The beautiful thing about the program is that it is interdisciplinary in nature. There's an effort to span all areas of the university so that everyone can participate in the innovation ecosystem."

Innovation and Growth

The entrepreneurship program, housed in the College of Business, is a multi-pronged approach to fostering the next generation of business leaders in South Florida and beyond. The Department of Management Programs offers a concentration in entrepreneurship with three core classes: an introduction to entrepreneurship; a focus on financing a business; and a consulting project in which students work directly with start-up companies.

"The strength of this program lies in our creation of an ecosystem where students are given hands-on experience and real-world information outside of a traditional class structure that supports student entrepreneurs through all stages of starting and launching a business," said Ethlyn Williams, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Management Programs.

The Adams Center for Entrepreneurship serves as the core of this ecosystem. Led by Kevin Cox, Ph.D., director and senior instructor, the center engages with students and the South Florida business community through avenues like the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp and the Shrimp Tank podcast; offers mentorship opportunities for aspiring student business creators by pairing them up with experienced business professionals; and hosts the Business Pitch Competition, where students across all majors can pitch their business ideas for the chance to win seed funding for their budding ventures.

"Students have access to seasoned entrepreneurs and business professionals as mentors willing to offer their expertise at all steps along the way for their ventures. We're committed to upholding an ecosystem that supports student founders from the idea stage to launching the company," Cox said. "Students can take a designated academic service learning course and are paired up with early-stage companies to work directly with founders, making the work our students do critical for these start-ups."

Cultivating a Spirit of Entrepreneurship

An entrepreneurial spirit has long been part of the foundation of Florida Atlantic, with the College of Business striving to partner with all entities in the university to keep that spirit thriving. When he arrived in 2013, Daniel Gropper, Ph.D., dean of the College of Business, saw an opportunity to build on this system.

"There was a lot of strength and potential in the College of Business with the Adams Center for Entrepreneurship and across the university in the other colleges," Gropper said. "We needed to build up our faculty expertise on the academic side, with recognized senior scholars, newer faculty, and experienced business mentors to support our students and what was going on in the business community. We built upon what our predecessors had done and added to the academic reputation of the entrepreneurship programs."

The college focused on three key parts to achieve the current entrepreneurial ecosystem: the recruitment of leading researchers and rising stars in the field of entrepreneurship; the emphasis of research in entrepreneurship, small businesses and family businesses; and further development of student competitions and existing outreach programs.

From those efforts came an interdisciplinary system that serves the college and community well:

• Tech Runway, with the Venture Program, is the incubator for startup companies, allowing students to gain hands-on experience with emerging ventures.
• The Adams Center for Entrepreneurship offers mentorship and pitch competitions for students to work through their creation process.
• The Shrimp Tank podcast engages with the flourishing business community in the region. Faculty members offer a robust academic curriculum that gives students the necessary theoretical framework.

"Good researchers make good teachers when they bring their work into the classroom, and they talk about the practical applications of the theoretical work they are doing," said Roland Kidwell, Ph.D., DeSantis Distinguished Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship. "All of this works cohesively with our student resources, the local community and research goals. We have been successful in seeing how these pieces fit together."

The entrepreneurship program broke into The Princeton Review's Top 50 four years ago and has steadily moved up in the rankings. This year, the undergraduate program is ranked No. 24 in the nation and the graduate program is ranked No. 42.

A vital factor of the success of this program is how it applies to all students, not just those in the College of Business — and how professors emphasize real-world applications students can model in their businesses, according to William Paczkowski, Ph.D., entrepreneurship instructor in the Department of Management Programs.

"Students in my class are learning by doing. I encourage them to enter the Business Pitch Competition to learn how to ask the right questions. Are they applying the right concepts versus regurgitating information they've memorized from a textbook?," Paczkowski said.

Vivian Yu, a junior in Florida Atlantic's Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, is pursuing entrepreneurship as a minor. She heard about the program from a friend, who suggested she enter it to sharpen her business skills as a future architect.

"I knew I needed that business perspective because, as an architect, you are selling your ideas," Yu said. "You can have an amazing product, but the venture won't go anywhere if you don't know how to pitch it."

Since participating in the program, Yu won runner-up in the Business Pitch Competition and has been able to finetune and start funding her own entrepreneurial venture, a crib made from wooden joinery that converts into other pieces of useable furniture as a child grows into adulthood.

It's a Mindset

"One thing that makes our program different is that we are encouraging everyone to have an entrepreneurial mindset across the college," said Kidwell. "If you are in health care or finance, that may not be a management or entrepreneurial track. Still, we have the resources to teach you this mindset and how to take calculated risks that will make you more marketable to jobs."

Florida Atlantic students have been making waves at national and local pitch competitions, emphasizing their creativity and ingenuity in creating pitches and potential companies. Two FAU High School dual-enrollees, Abigail Sinu and Noor Harbona, took first place for their biomedical technology at the Florida Venture Forum, while Thomerson's Potty Pal took first place in various competitions nationwide.

Alumnus Joseph Watson '24 is pursuing an MBA in the College of Business after graduating in the spring with a bachelor's in management. He won the Rising Star Award at the eMerge conference in Miami for talent and achievements. Currently interning at a tech startup in New York City, he credits Paczkowski's classwork style as an instrumental part of his learning.

"The different connections I have made, the networking I've done and the classes have all sparked my motivation. I now know where I can go in five years because I've been able to work with companies and have a blueprint of how to start," Watson said.

Leaders in the college agree that the future is bright for students coming out of the program, as Palm Beach County positions itself as "Wall Street South." The influx of companies from the Northeast setting up headquarters as well as office locations in the area has allowed the college to expand what it can do as a critical provider of local talent.

"The financial sector is growing rapidly in our area, and the ecosystem from Miami to Palm Beach County is becoming larger and more sophisticated," Gropper said. "We are uniquely positioned to serve that need through our students, faculty and partnerships."