As director of the University at Buffalo’s Blackstone LaunchPad, Hadar Borden works with student entrepreneurs and innovators every day.
But she’s also got the entrepreneurial spirit herself. Thanks to years of hard work, the Blackstone LaunchPad, a campus-based startup incubator and idea-sharing hub, is now starting to scale, just like the startups it aims to help.
“I think we demonstrated our value to our local and global community,” she said, “and how we did that is by really making sure we weren’t just supporting our students but thinking about the business community in our region.”
Blackstone LaunchPad has been steadily growing its student engagement and number of events hosted each academic year since 2018-19. The center, founded in March 2016, hit an all-time high in the 2021-22 school year, engaging with 9,217 students and holding 187 events.
It’s on track to beat those numbers this academic year, according to statistics provided by Borden: In fall 2022 it had engaged with 4,739 students and hosted 97 events. She expects those numbers to continue to grow, especially with recently added staff and expanded square footage.
Early this year, Borden added four university-funded, full-time professional (meaning not students) employees to her then-team of one. Now, they’re making operations more efficient and expanding programming.
That includes an operations coordinator; an entrepreneurial training coordinator, who will build out training programs at the center; an innovation sprint coordinator, who will create policies and procedures for how the center will engage with faculty and companies to expand partnerships; and a design challenge coordinator, who will identify topics, industries and partners to build out design challenges.
Sprint challenges, which started at UB in 2017, allow teams of students to come up with solutions to specific problems or questions posed by businesspeople. They can last from 40 minutes to a few days.
Design challenges, which began at UB in summer 2020, involve teams of students focusing on broader industries or topics, sometimes in collaboration with organizations. The challenges typically last about three to four weeks.
With a bigger team, Blackstone LaunchPad expects to move by the end of this summer to a larger space, still within the Student Union. Currently, the center is in a roughly 800-square-foot former storage closet, and the new space will be at least quadruple that size.
Blackstone LaunchPad is also working with a team of students to rebrand itself, which Borden expects to launch by the end of the semester.
The center’s “secret sauce” for scaling up is getting help from alumni and friends as well as building on those partnerships on and off campus, according to Borden.
That includes leaning on people to help where she didn’t have the expertise and using all the resources she could think of to get something done. For example, students help emcee programs which can lead to them talking with others about the center, becoming ambassadors. Then, full circle, some alums come back and are program facilitators.
“We know where our strengths are, and we bring in others on campus and in the community to fully support it,” she said. “I never felt like I was in it on my own. I always had partners."
