Virginia Tech wants to encourage students to be innovative and entrepreneurial and brought in the support of Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe to lend his support this week at the launch of the new Innovate Venture Lab. The lab, under the umbrella of the Apex Systems Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, will provide a place for student entrepreneurs to come and build up their ideas into startup companies as part of a larger, school-wide effort to boost Virginia Tech's profile as a hub of innovation.
"The venture lab is student run and focused on students," said Derick Maggard, the executive director at Apex. "It fits into our slogan of learn, launch, lead."
There have been several impressive startups born out of Virginia Tech of late already, and the school takes a leading role in innovative work like drone delivery testing. The lab and accompanying resources are all to draw interest from student innovators in particular Maggard said. It includes tools for building, testing and otherwise developing whatever it is that the students want to make, thanks to a $5 million investment in the Apex program from four alumni, whose IT company Apex also led to the naming of the larger program.
"We built it out for students to have as much control as possible," Maggard said. "They're running it their way."
Even outside Apex, Maggard said Virginia Tech is upping its startup-style footprint. Thousands of students are now enrolled in at least one entrepreneurship related course and plenty of those go on to compete in challenges and competitions for money and resources to turn their ideas into new startups. The students in the program itself are the ones that the school and its entrepreneurial advisers are particularly impressed by.
"The students in Apex will be the ones launching their own venture-backed high-growth startups," Maggard said. "That's part of why we run the Center very much like a startup."
"Virginia Tech is innovation."
The Apex program is still fairly new, having only begun last year. Each new school year will see larger numbers of potential Apex members and turn Virginia Tech into the regional center for all things student innovation, Maggard said. There's friendly competition with other schools interested in doing something similar too. This "coopitition" as Maggard referred to it will include exchange visits with Penn State for instance, with members of Virginia Tech's group going to see how their program works and vice-versa. But Maggard said he is supremely confident that eventually any high school student with an interest in building a startup will turn first to Virginia Tech.
"We want students to choose Virginia Tech instead of MIT or Stanford because of our innovative program," Maggard said. "Virginia Tech is innovation."
