Ideas in motion
UF Warrington's entrepreneurial playground
The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center at the Warrington College of Business is home to the next great business ideas. Whether that comes by equipping students with an entrepreneurial mindset or through innovative research that shapes the future, the center is playing an active role in the next generation of entrepreneurship.
It impacts the student experience in three ways—classes, co-curricular activities and experiential learning.
The center offers 12 undergraduate courses and 26 graduate courses to strengthen its undergraduate and graduate minors in entrepreneurship, as well as the Thomas S. Johnson Master of Science in Entrepreneurship program.
More than 3,000 UF students—about 5% of the entire UF student population—take an entrepreneurship course at the undergraduate or graduate level each year. Principles of Entrepreneurship, taught by Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center Director Jamie Kraft, is one of the largest entrepreneurship courses in the world. The class hosts 900 students in the fall, 900 in the spring and 400 in the summer. More than 8,000 students have taken the class since 2020, and half of them are from majors outside of UF Warrington.
“We’re focused on giving students the academic rigor and topical material to be more entrepreneurial, but the goal is not to create more business owners,” Kraft said. “We want to create an entrepreneurial mindset that can help students be entrepreneurial in whatever they do, whether that’s starting their own business, going to medical school, running a non-profit or something else.”
The center provides many opportunities for students to put what they learn in the classroom to practice. It gives a total of $125,000 to student entrepreneurs in $5,000-10,000 allotments throughout each year, assisting them with prototype development, customer discovery, and business planning and launching.
Students have a home to build their company at the Gator Hatchery, the center’s student incubator that hosts 40 teams from across campus every semester. Students benefit from advising and mentorship through the process and gain valuable insights on how to build their company. Two hundred teams sign up for the center’s Big Idea Competition every year with a total of $50,000 given out.
Students also build their real world knowledge through student clubs like the Entrepreneurship Collective and participate in TEDxUF, which encourages inspiration and innovation. Annual trips to Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas, showcase the entrepreneurial ecosystem and provide networking opportunities for students.
“We do standard things that a lot of programs and centers across the country do, but we go even deeper with them,” Kraft said. “We give more money away and prioritize more trips for our students.”
Alex Settles and Chris Pryor lead faculty research at the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center. Many other faculty across the college are involved in entrepreneurial research or teach entrepreneurship classes.
“We’re bringing in faculty from other departments to teach entrepreneurship students and give them unique perspectives from all over the college,” Settles said. “We’re bringing people together with different expertise.”
Including the contributions of Warrington faculty Gwen Lee, Tony Middlebrooks and David Ross, Warrington faculty entrepreneurship research has been published in Academy of Entrepreneurship Journal, Entrepreneurship Education, Journal of Leadership Studies, Journal of Management, Modern Classics in Entrepreneurship Studies, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and Strategic Management Review, among others.
Settles and Pryor are heavily involved in Academy of Management, Strategic Management Association, Academy of International Business, Southern Management Association and the Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference.
One unique aspect allows Warrington entrepreneurship faculty to be active in the classroom and their research. The center provides faculty with a platform to engage in research which is supported by Warrington’s research program.
“The goal is for research at Warrington to have an impact and be published in top tier publications with an impact that builds up the reputation of the college,” Settles said. “The college and center don’t tell us what to do, whereas other places outside of UF do. The impact matters more than the funding. Our funding is broad and allows us to create value in ways we want.”
Most entrepreneurship center faculty across the country focus on academics or research. At Warrington, entrepreneurship faculty are able to do both effectively.
