One of my biggest takeaways from the past few months of beginning the Provost Innovation Fellowship has been the fact that startup communities operate like social networks. As Ian Hathaway drove home in the talk he gave at UO in February, a few dozen entrepreneurial leaders acting like “supernodes” can drastically change an entire startup ecosystem community.
As a freshman at UO, this concept has been an incredibly empowering one. With over twenty thousand students--twenty times the size of my former high school--at first, the size of the student body felt overwhelmingly large. However, through reading The Startup Community Way and attending events, I’ve gotten to realize just how much opportunity each student has to make an impact that ripples outwards. For example, using the #GiveFirst mentality to highlight a fellow Provost Innovation scholar, Ethan Rife has been instrumental in organizing a weekly entrepreneurship coffee chat that has brought together various students from across the university. His example is a prime case about how just a couple of entrepreneur leaders acting with trust, good faith, and reciprocity can bring a value shift to an entire ecosystem.
As I think about my next three and a half years at UO, and what impact I want to make, I’m inspired to lead the way towards a more entrepreneurial campus alongside the other eleven fellows and the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship team. Currently, I’m in the process of starting a university-backed, student-run vending machine social enterprise that sells snack products made by local small businesses. By placing vending snack machines in heavy trafficked places around campus, local businesses can have a key avenue for conducting product testing on the college-age consumer. At the same time, UO students can develop hands-on entrepreneurship experience through managing the business. Eventually, I hope that a portion of the revenue can also be reinvested into local Eugene nonprofits, developing better town-gown relationships.
Through creating connections between local businesses, local nonprofits, and an interdisciplinary group of student entrepreneurs, I hope that this project is able to serve as its own junction point in some small way. By providing a space for the diverse stakeholders of both the Eugene community and UO to collaborate and interact, hopefully more interesting collaborations will be launched out of it. At the same time, I’m looking forward to developing as an entrepreneur leader, championing other entrepreneurship projects going on in the university and helping connect students with each other. There is still so much to learn, but if anything, I’m excited to continue to understand how to make an impact.
If you’re interested in chatting more about the Provost Innovation Student Fellowship program, my project, getting involved in the UO entrepreneurship scene, or anything else, I’d love to hear from you! I can be contacted at jjz@uoregon.edu