The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Trinity University has received an award from the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, or GCEC, for its entrepreneurial partnerships and programming.
This award — the 2021 GCEC Nasdaq Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence Award in the category of schools with 5,000 or fewer students — was created in 2000 by the New York-headquartered Nasdaq Stock Market alongside GCEC.
The GCEC is a consortium of 250 university entrepreneurship programs worldwide who collaborate on program development and sharing best practices, as well as other initiatives.
Luis Martinez, director of Trinity's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is a recent appointee to its executive board.
Other recipients of the 2021 award among schools with larger student bodies included the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Texas A&M University and the University of Chicago, said Martinez.
Trinity's innovation and entrepreneurship center has grown class enrollment to 10% of Trinity's student body per year, with students from 44 of Trinity’s 47 majors. Trinity is the first liberal arts and sciences university to win the award, Martinez said.
"It's a significant achievement to be awarded this honor as a primarily undergraduate, liberal arts and sciences university and an emerging Hispanic-Serving Institution," he said. "We offer no MBA or doctoral degrees, so to join esteemed peers at Rice, MIT, Stanford, University of Chicago, is a testament to the quality of our undergraduate entrepreneurship program."
Some of the achievements of Trinity's Center for innovation and Entrepreneurship cited by the GCEC were its experiential learning curriculum and partnerships with Geekdom, Students+Startups, VelocityTX, Trinity Venture Mentoring Service, the Louis H. Stumberg New Venture Competition and Launch SA, among others.
Martinez added that Trinity's students have been a large part of the program's success.
"For example, we've awarded $360,000 since the inception of our Stumberg New Venture Competition seven years ago," he said. "Those student-led companies have gone on to raise over $6 million in additional early-stage funding and are generating jobs. Every year, we have students graduating to go on to work for the companies they start while they are still students."
Recent alumni of Trinty's center have gone on to accelerators such as Techstars and Y Combinator, been selected for the Thiel Fellowship, and been named Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020 and 2021, Martinez noted.
