Last week’s entrepreneurship event was marked by phenomenal advice from our speakers and fantastic questions from our audience! Thanks to everyone that made it out to the event!
I think a main takeaway for me from the event was that entrepreneurship skills are valuable even if you don’t plan to be an entrepreneur! Maybe you’re avidly pursuing professorship; having the ability to pitch a project or a proposal is an absolute requirement of that field! Maybe you’re planning to go into consulting; business acumen and the ability to deconstruct complex science into simple language are critical to your success. Maybe you’re thinking about project management or R&D in industry; you’ll need to be able to work with a team, meet deadlines, understand a business plan and pitch project proposals. Maybe you think that because you don’t have a great idea you can’t be an entrepreneur- FALSE! A product or project doesn’t get off the ground without a team! Look into the resources available on campus (see list below) and see how you can get involved!
At our event we heard from Rich McAloney from the Impact Centre. The Impact Centre provides student entrepreneurs with the early-stage guidance to help move technology from the lab to the world! Check out their resources here:
http://www.impactcentre.ca/us/uoft/
They have classes and workshops alongside a whole host of services for getting a project off the ground.
We also heard from James Stuart, from UofT’s The Hatchery. He spoke about Launch Labs, a program specifically aimed at graduate student entrepreneurs! You can find more information here:
https://hatchery.engineering.utoronto.ca/
In addition to the services that The Hatchery provides for building a startup, Executive Director Joseph Orozco also teaches several classes on campus (check out MIE488 and APS1036). Launch Labs is a great resource for project ideas that come directly from your research.
Find additional entrepreneurship resources here:
http://entrepreneurs.utoronto.ca/accelerators/
Including H2i, the Health Innovation Hub; Start@UTIAS; UTEST and more!
If you would like to see more entrepreneurship content from ILead:Grad please reach out to us on social media!