Boston University’s Entrepreneurship Club launched StartBU Monday, rebranding and redesigning their longstanding Startup Challenge.
StartBU’s kickoff, which was held in Engineering Product Innovation Center, offered its newest members pizza and a presentation of the club’s program, featuring guest speakers Ian Mashiter, director of entrepreneurship activities at Questrom School of Business, and Rebecca Liebman, co-founder and CEO of LearnLux.
During Mashiter’s portion of the presentation, he announced major changes to BU’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.
“Within the next month or so, we’re going to be announcing a whole lot more resources applied to entrepreneurship on campus,” Mashiter said. “It’s going to be called the Innovate at BU initiative. It will affect curriculum. It will affect research, but it will also affect some of the activities that you’re doing.”
Mashiter went on to reveal that the initiative’s launch would be accompanied by the acquisition of a new location on campus: the space formerly occupied by RadioShack at 730 Commonwealth Ave.
“The home for this initiative is going to be just a block down here,” Mashiter said. “The BUzz Lab will go away, because we have to have a new name for a new center, and it will be replaced by the BUild Lab.”
Mashiter said the new space will be ready toward the end of this semester.
Brian Fakhoury, director of StartBU and secretary of the Entrepreneurship Club, said the club was aware of the initiative’s forthcoming launch but was not privy to its details prior to Mashiter’s announcement.
“We knew most of the details,” Fakhoury said. “We didn’t know about the name, [and] we didn’t know that it was going to come so soon. Of course, every time we hear more news about the new initiative and the new space, specifically, we get very excited.”
Upon its launch, Innovate at BU, with its expanded entrepreneurial resources, will bolster the StartBU program, which Fakhoury explained in greater detail.
“Previously, it was called Startup Challenge,” Fakhoury said. “The keyword there is challenge. So challenge implies it’s going to be competitive amongst teams, and we figured that wasn’t best to build community around here.”
Saloni Shah, StartBU coordinator and InnovateEDU team director, said the club’s decision to rebrand and restructure the program was an effort to prepare participants for BU’s entrepreneurial pipeline.
“We wanted to have program that fit well into the entrepreneurial pipeline and got everyone prepared for the next steps,” Shah said. “We also wanted to create a program that was more fun and to the point and that brought together people of different backgrounds.”
Now, the program will be geared more toward skill growth, Fakhoury said.
“The workshops now are going to be focused more on actually just developing the company versus developing a good competition,” Fakhoury said. “In the past, we trained up teams. Now, we’re training up new entrepreneurs, which is what the goal is.”
Fakhoury added that, rather than building toward a competition, teams will prepare for a final presentation of their work.
“Now, instead of doing a challenge amongst teams, it’s growing all together,” Fakhoury said. “The final thing is no longer a pitch competition. It’s a demo day where everybody shows what they did.”
Both Shah and Fakhoury noted that, while StartBU is taking a less competitive approach to entrepreneurship, the club still offers a competition-based program, InnovateEDU.
“We still have a competitive side in the Entrepreneurship Club,” Fakhoury said. “We figured InnovateEDU now is going to be the really competitive thing, and then StartBU is going to be the noncompetitive thing.”
Brandon Chen, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, said he attended the kickoff in hopes of shaking up his academic routine.
“I was getting tired of the whole basic routine of going to class, doing work, studying,” Chen said. “I kind of wanted to go out and do something more.”
Lina Elansary, a sophomore in the Questrom School of Business, said she thought StartBU might give her a better sense of the future she’s heading toward.
“I want to eventually start my own business,” Elansary said. “I saw this at Splash, and I thought it would be a cool experience to see what it’s like.”
Fakhouri said the club’s leaders were excited both by the kickoff’s turnout and looking forward to StartBU’s future.
“We thought we had really great room here; it was packed … We’re definitely excited with the first workshop, and that makes us excited for the rest of the semester,” Fakhouri said.
