Category Archives: social entrepreneurship

Terp Toolkit: Finding the Right Entrepreneurship Course for You

By Madison Mazer

As Spring 2022 course registration begins, keep in mind the array of entrepreneurship classes that the Dingman Center offers. Starting this week, students can sign up to take any of our three classes next semester including Fearless Founders: New Venture Practicum (BMGT 468R), Ladies First Founders (BMGT 369D), or Fearless Founders: Social Entrepreneurship Laboratory (BMGT 468U).

The best part, you don’t have to be a business major to take advantage of these unique classes. Programs and courses provided by the Dingman Center are open to all majors and all interested undergraduate students are encouraged to register or apply. 

Course overview:

BMGT 468R – Fearless Founders: New Venture Practicum

This three-credit course is for undergraduate students committed to an idea after validation. Students experiment with business models, revenue streams, and go-to-market strategies. By the end of this course, some startups are securing their first customers and generating revenue, while others are working on a beta or pilot. In the final class, students pitch for seed funding to move their business forward. The course is taught by Oliver Schlake, clinical professor, management and organization.

If you are interested in registering for the Spring 2022 class, please fill out our application.

BMGT 369D Ladies First Founders

Ladies First Founders is the Dingman Center’s one-credit spring semester course for female and non-binary students interested in entrepreneurship. Taught by Sara Herald, champion of our Ladies First Initiative, the course helps students build soft skills for overcoming gender biases in entrepreneurship. Students do not need to have launched a venture, as the focus of the course is on demystifying entrepreneurship. The syllabus includes a blend of skill-building workshops and networking events. Topics include the how to’s of networking and mentorship, finding balance as a founder/student/human, overcoming imposter syndrome, startup pitching and body language, funding and how to get it, and more.

BMGT 468U – Fearless Founders: Social Entrepreneurship Laboratory

Taught by Dingman Center Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence Drew Bewick, the Social Entrepreneurship Laboratory is an active learning environment for students to test their hypotheses around the creation of social ventures and develop a deep understanding of how the field of social entrepreneurship works. Teams will iteratively test their ideas for solving social problems through experimentation, document results, incorporate feedback from key stakeholders, develop a minimum viable product, and present their outcomes. Come to this class interested in changing the world and leave with a social entrepreneur’s mindset and valuable experience using pioneering startup methodologies.

Why entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship courses can service students beyond the classroom, teaching them important skills like innovation, collaboration, and complex problem-solving. Additionally, these courses can be useful to all students, not just those interested in pursuing a career in business. 

Ladies First Founders (BMGT369D) instructor, Sara Herald, agrees that these classes are the perfect oppurtunity to get valuable experience, which will apply to any field of study. 

“Learning how to think like an entrepreneur is beneficial for everyone, no matter what profession you go into. The entrepreneurial mindset involves the ability to maximize scarce resources while navigating uncertain environments; learning how to do that will make you incredibly valuable whether as a founder or leader in another company,” said Herald.  

Some of these courses, like Fearless Founders: Social Entrepreneurship Laboratory (BMGT468U), can even help you make a positive impact on your community. 

“Successfully employing market-based strategies to solve critical social and environmental concerns in ways that are both technologically viable and economically sustainable are in demand in the world today,” said BMGT468U Professor Drew Bewick. 

If you want “hands-on, active environment that fuses agile management and lean start-up practices like no other class in the region,” then according to Bewick, this is the class for you.  

Not only are these courses a great way to support your future, but they are also a way to receive day-to-day support. For example, Herald thinks of Ladies First Founders as more than just a class. 

“Ladies First Founders is a community of female entrepreneurs. It’s a place for women and non-binary Terps who want to start their own ventures to feel like they belong in entrepreneurship and support each other. We learn both the hard and soft skills of starting a company, but ultimately the most valuable thing students leave the course with is a sense of confidence and belief in themselves as future founders,” said Herald. 

Entrepreneurship on campus:

As an undergraduate student, now is the perfect time to start learning about entrepreneurship, especially if you’re interested in starting your own business someday. 

“When you’re a student, it’s a great time to get hands-on experience launching a venture. There are so many resources available at UMD, including the Dingman Center. It’s a safe place. Mentors are available to help you learn how to avoid common pitfalls. You’ll meet interesting students. You’ve heard how practice makes perfect? It’s no different when it comes to launching ventures to make an impact,” said Bewick. 

In addition to the Dingman Center, Herald advises taking advantage of on campus resources like the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Do Good Institute, UM Ventures, and MTech. There are extensive opportunities to further your venture and sharpen your entrepreneurial skills at UMD, and these courses are a great place to start. 

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Senior Send-Off: The Synapto Team

In our Senior Send-Off series, the Dingman Center celebrates the student founders who are part of the graduating class of Spring 2020. We are so pleased to have had the chance to get to know each of these talented entrepreneurs through our programs. 

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From left: Chris Look, Anoop Patel, Megha Guggari, David Boegner, Dhruv Patel

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Co-founder & CEO – Dhruv Patel ’20, Bioengineering major
Co-founder & CTO – Christopher Look ’20, Bioengineering major
Lead Systems Engineer – David Boegner ’20, Bioengineering major
Lead Software Engineer – Megha Guggari ’20, Bioengineering major
Lead R&D Engineer – Anoop Patel ’20, Bioengineering major

The Synapto team is made up of five University of Maryland bioengineering majors who are using a portable EEG and machine learning to provide doctors with a more efficient tool to diagnose Alzheimer’s. Having worked on this idea since 2017, the team has achieved many milestones along the way, including a prize from NIH, second place at the 2018 Do Good Challenge, and third place at the 2019 Pitch Dingman Competition Finals. The Dingman Center has had numerous opportunities to watch these founders grow: Chris Look enrolled in our Terp Startup accelerator for a different idea, Senvision, as a freshman; David Boegner and Anoop Patel represented Synapto in the 2018 Terp Startup cohort; and Megha Guggari was part of the first cohort of Ladies First Founders. The Synapto team took home our Rudy Award for Social Entrepreneurs of the Year in 2019, and we are excited to see how these impressive founders continue to shine post-graduation.

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Student Insights from the Hisaoka Speaker Series featuring Seth Goldman

On October 30, 2019, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship’s Robert G. Hisaoka Speaker Series invited Seth Goldman, the co-founder and Tea-EO emeritus of Honest Tea and Executive Chair of Beyond Meat, for an intimate conversation with Robert Hisaoka ’79 at The Clarice. Read on for one student’s insights on Goldman’s talk.

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by: Allison Criswell ’21

In a world where obesity is on the rise and Mother Nature is on the fall, “healthy and sustainable” has become something of a societal trend. Eating clean and taking care of the earth has never been cooler. But when it comes to our taste buds, we don’t like to make sacrifices unless the alternative is just as delicious. Lucky for us, Seth Goldman, Co-Founder of Honest Tea and Executive Chair of Beyond Meat, has spent the last two decades making it possible to be an environmentalist and a health nut without giving up flavor.

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Terp Startup BreakBox Has a Fun Solution for Recycling Glass: Throw It

This summer, the Dingman Center will be conducting interviews with the fifteen student startups who are participating in our Terp Startup summer accelerator at the College Park WeWork. Participating student entrepreneurs received a stipend up to $5,000 that would enable them to work exclusively on their startups over eight weeks in the summer.

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Break Box-01Break Box Recycling Inc.

Founder & CEO: Ryan Perpall ’20, Environmental Anthropology

DC: Tell us about your startup. What problem are you solving and for whom?

Perpall: Although glass containers can be recycled endlessly, without losing strength or purity, they are the number one contaminators of recycled paper, plastic and aluminum. Removing post-consumer glass from the recycling stream helps other items retain their post-market value, and lowers the contamination level in county Material Recovery Facilities.

Our solution is to divert post-consumer glass away from the landfill and towards alternative end-markets that include glass artists, construction companies, & homeowners. Our most notable glass diversion operation is our Bottle Throwing Trailer. We built an outdoor, mobile unit that allows people (18+) to break glass containers by throwing them against a ‘break wall’ inside the trailer. We provide break games, music and LED lights to enhance the break experience. All of the glass broken at the Bottle Throwing trailer is barreled up and repurposed for use in the construction industry or by local glass artists. 

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Takeaways from Cohort 2 of Ladies First Founders

 

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Today marks the last class of the semester for Ladies First Founders, a one-credit course led by Sara Herald, the Dingman Center’s associate director for social entrepreneurship. Last year, Sara launched Ladies First Founders as part of the Center’s Ladies First initiative to get more women engaged in entrepreneurship programming at University of Maryland. Ladies First Founders provides a platform for aspiring female and non-binary founders across campus to come together, find community and learn strategies for overcoming the gender gap in entrepreneurship.

Last week, each female founder in the course provided perspective on their journey this semester to a room of their peers, Dingman Center staff and mentors. While many made significant progress on developing their ideas, all of these young women reflected on the value of the course for their own personal growth. Below are some notes on each of the founders, their ideas and their journeys.

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OnCall Reflects on Participating in Hult@UMD

We’re very excited to feature a piece written by the winners of the 2019 “Hult@UMD” competition, as they reflect on their experience from the initial concept for their idea all the way to competing at the Regional level of the Hult Prize in Boston.

How to Change the World: One Pitch at a Time

By Rasheeq Rayhan, MBA ’20

It all started with a lunch at Rudy’s Café on a fine November afternoon. My friend Alex Woo, a Master of Biomedical Engineering Candidate and Robert Fischell Institute Fellow, was working on a project to build a new medical device. We started to explore the implications of such a device if it were introduced in a developing country, where medical technology was mostly outdated, number of skilled doctors was inadequate and primary healthcare was highly expensive.

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An Interview with Hult@UMD Winner OnCall

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In the fall semester, OnCall was crowned winner of the Hult Prize competition at the University of Maryland, College Park. The Hult Prize is the largest student social enterprise case competition in the world. On Friday, November 30th, fifteen teams competed in a local edition of the event to solve the challenge of how to develop a business idea to create 10,000 meaningful jobs for young people over the next decade. OnCall will move onto the regional level of the Hult Prize competition to be held this weekend in March 2019 in Boston.  

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Introducing the Spring 2019 Cohort of Ladies First Founders

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On Tuesday afternoons, the Smith School’s executive board room is taken over by the second cohort of the Dingman Center’s Ladies First Founders program, a group of nine young women united by their experiences as female entrepreneurs. At the head of the room’s imposing conference table sits adjunct professor Sara Herald, MBA ’11, the Dingman Center’s Associate Director for Social Entrepreneurship and founder of the Ladies First initiative to get more women involved in entrepreneurship at UMD.

This year, the Ladies First Founders were paired with expert female mentors to help guide their entrepreneurial journeys. The theme of this year’s Ladies First initiative is centered around role models, and these successful women provide an inspiring template for the cohort to follow. Over the course of the semester, we’ll be catching up with these student founders to see how their venture ideas have progressed under the guidance of professor Sara Herald and their mentors.

Read on to learn more about the diverse group of female founders and businesses that make up the Spring 2019 Ladies First Founders cohort:

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A Tour of Entrepreneurship & Innovation in France & Morocco

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Medina in Marrakech

In collaboration with the Center for Global Business at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship sent Student Venture Programs Manager Chris Rehkamp, MS ’18 on a study abroad program highlighting innovation and entrepreneurship in France and Morocco. The program was led by Smith School Associate Professor Oliver Schlake. The following is one student’s reflection of their experience.

by: Hannah Shraim ’20

In the span of ten days, I visited three countries, submerged myself into two very distinct cultures, and drank lots and lots of tea. Let me explain.

Rather than simply getting an education, securing a job, and acquiring a well-paying salary, I want to do more with my degree. I am a big believer that business can be used to solve social issues, so starting organizations that can utilize profits that serve underprivileged communities is something I have always been eager to explore.

I was granted the opportunity to study entrepreneurship and innovation in France and Morocco with a remarkable group of Terps. As a person who studied French since the age of four, I was particularly excited to go on this trip. While we stopped by Monaco for a day—hence the third country—the jist of our learning came from France and Morocco, which are connected by forty-four years of French occupation.

Besides the fact that both are francophone nations, there are certain commonalities within the entrepreneurial practices in France and Morocco. Notwithstanding, there are vast differences as well.

Now, let’s dive into what went down.

 

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A Summer Internship Making Entrepreneurship Inclusive at SEED SPOT

The Dugal Impact Fellowship Program provides a stipend for two undergraduate students to spend their summers interning at early-stage social enterprises, thanks to a generous gift from Ish ’05 and Priya Dugal ’05. 

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by: Adam Sarsony ’20

Incubators across the world tend to focus on established startups that are past seed stage. However, a group called SEED SPOT has decided to try a different strategy: focusing on seed stage startups, mostly with minority and female founders, and helping them to build social enterprises from the ground up.

This past summer I was fortunate enough to intern at SEED SPOT through a Dingman Center fellowship. SEED SPOT is a social enterprise incubator with offices in Washington, D.C. and Phoenix, providing training and resources to founders of nonprofits and for-profits with a social mission to help them grow and measure their impact. Throughout every level of engagement, SEED SPOT focuses on minority and female social entrepreneurs.

IMG_2716-1.JPGWorking at SEED SPOT was an experience like no other—I’ve thought about it as working at a startup that’s in the business of helping startups. The team is small and incredibly passionate about their work. The organization is only a few years old, having seen massive growth since first starting out and only recently adding their WeWork location in DC.

The SEED SPOT office in DC is littered with Mac chargers, marketing materials, books about social entrepreneurship, Harvard Business Review journals, and notebooks that SEED SPOT team members brought back from conferences to share. Working there was just as much an opportunity to access the SEED SPOT library as it was a job (which was perfect for nerds like myself).

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