Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation provides students with entrepreneurial skills

Students have different reasons for attending college, but all of them have one universal goal – besides making their parents happy – and that is to further their education while completing an internship(s), which hopefully precedes a career.

While employers want job seekers with hard skills in a specific area of expertise, they also seek candidates with special soft skills – the skills that cannot be taught, such as drive, persistence, initiative and optimism.

These are the assets that define successful entrepreneurs and are the skills that UCF's Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation are teaching students of all disciplines to utilize at no-cost.

UCF Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Founding Director Dr. Cameron Ford said that the center is UCF's academic resource.

"The reason I say it that way is that there are a number of entrepreneurship initiatives that UCF offers – UCF's incubation program, the Small Business Development Center, GrowFL…," Ford said. "Those are all outreach activities though. Those are not student-oriented activities, but all of these things are what we like to think of as our UCF ecosystem."

While UCF provides numerous entrepreneurial resources in the community, CEI's niche area focuses on the aspiring entrepreneur. Ford said that knowledge matters when it comes to being a successful entrepreneur, and for students who really want to do that, CEI can help.

"If there are students who really are interested in becoming entrepreneurs, we're trying to provide them with the skills and resources to make it easier for them to move forward with that, and also to be more capable of doing that," Ford said. "In other words, it's sort of like playing a sport. You need good training and good coaching to be a better performer."

Whether a communications major or an engineering student, Ford said that every student needs to be an entrepreneurial thinker; they need to learn how to create economic value and how to benefit others with the skills they possess. He described this as "creating T-shaped people," a term used by Tina Seelig, an entrepreneurship professor at Stanford Business School.

"The down part of the T is your disciplinary depth – do you really know how to do something? Maybe you're a great mechanical engineer, a great musician or maybe you're a great health care provider, but at the same time, you need the broad entrepreneurial thinking skills – that's this [bottom of the T] part," Ford said. "That allows you to understand how you can create new opportunities to improve what you do and become more economically viable."

Ariel Anaya, president of CEO Knights, UCF's entrepreneur club, has an ideology similar to Ford's.

"[CEO Knights] gets students to start thinking about entrepreneurship and help them understand how [important] it is no matter where you go," Anaya said.

Anaya interns at UCF's Business Incubator, where he works with new start-ups. He said the most exciting part about his internship is opening up the world of start-ups to students, where they can find a multitude of internship opportunities.

"It's [start-ups] started by CEOs and founders, who have experience in industries, ranging from consulting to engineering," Anaya said. "And they bring on a student, who actually works side-by-side with the founders and CEOs. Basically, you're helping start the beginning of a business versus going into an entry-level position and having them give you the same, tedious work from day to day."

If students would rather work on their own business idea then they can visit CEI Coaches' Corner, where they can pitch a plan to experts in the field and receive feedback.

Ace Glenn, senior finance major and founder of CourseMob, utilized Coaches' Corner before competing in last year's King of the Court, CEI's elevator pitch competition, and the Joust Business Tournament, CEI's business plan competition.

Glenn won both competitions on account of his business plan for CourseMob, a teaching tool that allows students to learn on the go. Yesterday, Feb. 1, CourseMob launched its system full-throttle, which features 40 available classes at UCF.

"CEI has a lot of different resources that help entrepreneurs. One of those is Coaches' Corner, which is probably the thing that had one of the largest impacts on CourseMob," Glenn said. "Basically anyone can go into the Coaches' Corner and pitch an idea or a full-fledged business plan. They have very talented people in there that can kind of help you and guide you in the right direction."

Although Glenn discovered CEI his freshman year, he wished he went in sooner.

"I was petrified of going in there and looking dumb, but it is probably the worst thing I have ever done because going in there enabled me to do everything I am able to do now," Glenn said. "I would just tell everyone: don't hesitate to find those resources because it will completely change the way you look at things, and it will be faster than you could ever do by yourself."

The Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation is located on the first floor of the Business Administration I Building on the UCF main campus. Find out more information about upcoming events and competitions at cei.ucf.edu or call 407-823-3683.