Florida Polytechnic University may be known for its STEM focus, but now it's getting attention for its entrepreneurship program.
While many universities have a typical 1% participation for entrepreneurship programs, Florida Polytechnic's innovation fostering software has 30% of the student body signed up, or 420 students.
"It's a little bigger than helping people do startups," Justin Heacock, the university’s entrepreneurship coordinator, said. "It's helping capture innovation. What's cool is you can capture every idea in a university, which typically isn't done, but the nice thing is we're so new [as a university] so we can do that."
The software, called "The Phoenix Nest" after the university's mascot, is a landing spot for any student with an innovative idea. Students can achieve help with three different needs: ideas, proof of concept, or trying to launch a startup.
The idea stemmed when Heacock came to the newly-launched school three years ago, after being involved in Florida State University and University of South Florida's entrepreneurship programs.
One of the main issues he saw with those, and other traditional entrepreneurship programs, was forcing students to fit in a box with a constricting time frame.
"It's an ongoing (process for students) and we're trying to blow the roof off it," Heacock said. "An incubation process is having to do this in one year, here's the end goal, here's the showcase. But for the students, it's an emotional experience — it's 'Oh, my god, I can change the world.' So it's helping them through that and understand and relating that to their time, which is outside that one year time frame."
The amount of ideas in The Phoenix Nest is also physically represented in a patent-pending pillar that changes colors — red is up to 200 ideas, orange is above 200 and so on. Eventually, Heacock hopes to create those into a hologram that will be placed throughout each building on campus to make a statement on the innovation happening.
"What I want to do with these is create an innovative culture," he said. "You can put the pillars on every building to show innovation is at the forefront, here's what we're working on."
"This is something I don't want to hold at just Florida Poly. Together, universities have to get in this experience and the world will get more entrepreneurial."
The software has garnered global attention. The Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers selected the Lakeland university as a finalist for The Phoenix Next, which took Florida Polytechnic officials to the finalists' stage in Sweden.
"We have the scaffolding up, now we need the infrastructure — more staffing, more money," Heacock said. "This conference allows us to say, 'This approach we're doing is unique.'"
Florida Polytechnic was a finalist along with Harvard University, Texas A&M, Penn State and Florida State University.
"Schools hundreds of years old with billion-dollar endowments were there, versus our one-man program — it was interesting to be a part of that conversation," he said. "Plus it's nice to say we tied with Harvard."
Eventually, Heacock hopes to serve as an example for other Florida universities looking to revamp their entrepreneurship programs.
"There's tons of ways you can go, but universities should do this," he said. "It creates a better student experience. This is something I don't want to hold at just Florida Poly. Together, universities have to get in this experience and the world will get more entrepreneurial. What I want for Poly is, as a university, to be a leader and help the state as a whole."
