Every year, about 3,000 new students join the Boston University community with over 300 majors ranging from music to chemistry and everything in between. For non-business students, entrepreneurship may seem out of reach.
Innovate@BU, a center located on BU’s Charles River Campus, provides students with resources, funding and mentorship to pursue business ventures — regardless of their academic major or background.
Austin Boyer, associate director of marketing and communications for Innovate@BU, described the center as a place to “develop innovation skills and entrepreneurial mindsets” through events, extracurricular programs and an “innovation and entrepreneurship” minor.
Through the center, all BU students can learn to think like an entrepreneur, he said.
“You absolutely do not need to be a business major to have an impact and to make a change, [to] address a problem [and] be an intrapreneur,” he said.
One of the lowest-commitment ways to get involved, Boyer said, is through free events like “Pitch and Pizza,” where students have 60 seconds to propose an idea for a project and then receive feedback.
Students can also develop their ideas through more time-intensive programs, like the Summer Accelerator and Pathfinder Bootcamps.
By utilizing these programs, some students have gone from having little knowledge on entrepreneurship to running their own businesses.
Meritxell Ortodo, a senior in the College of Engineering, is one of co-founders of Agrinova, a student-led startup working to develop affordable on-site soil testing tools. She said Innovate@BU helped guide the team and connected them with relevant contacts.
Her introduction to Innovate@BU was through the New Venture Competition, an annual competition where student founders pitch ideas and receive feedback and coaching, with the chance to win part of the $80,000 in prizes awarded.
Around this time, Ortodo said the team also applied for Innovate@BU’s Summer Accelerator and Innovation Pathway programs, which both provide workshops, mentoring and funding for emerging startups.
The Summer Accelerator program is a ten-week intensive in which student founders receive a stipend of up to $10,000 to work on their ventures full-time. This year, Agrinova was one of 12 teams accepted into the program.
Ortodo said it is “incredibly easy” to get involved with Innovate@BU.
“Even if you just have an idea, they’ll give you a step-by-step list, [saying] ‘This is your idea and this is how it fits,’” she said.
Ortodo emphasized that Innovate@BU is accessible for all students, even those with no knowledge of how businesses function — like herself, a biomedical engineering major.
“Innovate really takes the time,” Ortodo said. “If you go through every step of the process, let’s say of the Innovation Pathway [program], you’re granted all these resources to help you better understand the business aspect of it all.”
Bella Ramirez, a recent BU graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences and College of Communication, described having a similar experience at Innovate@BU.
Ramirez is the CEO and founder of Wicked Smaht Comedy, an intercollegiate comedy production studio in the Boston area.
“We connect college students in the Boston area to create ‘Saturday Night Live’-style shows so that they’re able to expand their networks as well as get opportunities for stipends for their work in comedy,” she said.
The company uses the funds from their live shows to fund various nonprofits in the Boston area.
“We’re basically a community-building comedy center,” Ramirez said.
During her sophomore year, Ramirez applied for the Innovation Pathway for guidance on Wicked Smaht’s feasibility. She said despite her non-business background, Innovate@BU helped her foster an entrepreneurial mindset and prioritize the tasks needed to run the startup.
“I’ve never taken a class in Questrom,” Ramirez said. “From a transcript perspective, you wouldn’t expect me to have the involvement that I do in business and entrepreneurship, and that’s purely because Innovate has been able to reach me where I’m at and make me go further.”
Ortodo said her advice for first-year students interested in entrepreneurship would be to “go for it.”
“[Innovate@BU has] the resources and the tools to help you get to where you need to be, and it’s the safest place to do it,” she said. “There’s literally no better support.”
Bella Ramirez was a city co-editor for The Daily Free Press during the fall 2022 semester. She was not involved in the reporting, writing or editing of this article.
