TEDCO, the Maryland Technology Development Corp., has expanded its Maryland Innovation Initiative program to include Bowie State University and is investing $500,000 over the next two years to help students there commercialize their business ideas.
Bowie State received $250,000 in the previous and current fiscal years to implement programs that promote entrepreneurship and innovation. The school is contributing an additional $50,000 each year to the effort.
The school plans to use $77,540 to fund the BSU Entrepreneurship XTreme Pilot, a two- to three-month business accelerator program that will give eight students a stipend and pair them with founders and business owners as they develop their businesses. It will also launch a grant program to commercialize the business ideas of Bowie State faculty and develop other entrepreneurial development programs.
Frostburg State University also will receive TEDCO funds as part of the MII expansion. MII was created to fund the commercialization of faculty research at institutions like Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University and three University of Maryland campuses.
It's goal at Bowie and Frostburg states is to help students get onboarding and experience in Maryland’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.
“There is a need for an entrepreneurial, energetic, educated, innovative workforce and we have that workforce,” said MII Executive Director Arti Santhanam. “We just have to engage them in the right way.”
Although the program expects to jump-start two to three companies, for Santhanam the real value of the program is in creating a workforce in Maryland with an entrepreneurial mindset for the startups TEDCO funds through MII.
“The regular MIII programming is very much focused on research and tech transfer. This is so much more than that,” said Santhanam. “It's involving the students, it's involving the community, it's involving industry partnerships. So this is going to be a very exciting time for us.”
TEDCO recognizes both Bowie State and Frostburg as anchors of the community. As much as the universities are piloting entrepreneurship programs, this funding and use of the MII funds at more “comprehensive” and less research-focused schools is a pilot for TEDCO.
“We hope that the lessons we learn from what we do at Bowie can be then applied to the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Coppin State University and Towson,” Santhanam said. “There's a lot of potential, but there's not much funding going towards these activities in all of those schools. We want to be able to use the MII program to reach them.”
