Entrepreneurship is about solving problems and making a positive impact. At Northeastern University, we’re empowering the thinkers and doers who will fuel the economies of tomorrow and launch the ventures that benefit all humankind. As a world-leader in experiential learning, Northeastern students across all life and career stages learn about entrepreneurship not only in the classroom, but also through real-world experience—launching ventures, doing co-ops at those ventures and other startups, and participating in Northeastern’s wide range of student-led entrepreneurship organizations. “Student-led” is the primary design driver in our entrepreneurship ecosystem, and all programming is made with students, not just for them, ensuring they take charge of their future and embrace life-long learning.
Northeastern University Center for Entrepreneurship Education (NUCEE) oversees a variety of programs centered on experiential entrepreneurship. Our extracurricular offerings are wraparound support that parallel with and scaffold upon classroom learning, creating the holistic experiential entrepreneurship education and internal support structures critical for the success of Northeastern as a leader among entrepreneurial universities. The initiative taken by our students to support and develop new, inclusive programming is integral to experiential education and the support given to our community members. This past academic year, we awarded over $440,000 to foster student entrepreneurship in the form of grants and funds to student learners, founders, ventures, student-led entrepreneurship organizations, and support programs. At NUCEE, our guiding philosophy is “good humans, sound ventures, world leaders.” We focus on the individual, not just building ventures, but future ecosystem leaders.
Central to our success is Mosaic, a university-wide umbrella organization that supports student-led entrepreneurship groups. Student leadership, inclusivity, empowerment, and growth are integral pillars of all programming. The 14 Mosaic organizations engage 8,000+ Northeastern community members each year while supporting 500+ ventures across our 10 colleges and 3 undergraduate campuses. Mosaic students craft programming to educate future entrepreneurs, enable peer-to-peer community learning, and support a venture’s growth through client services. Student management teams interview and fill roles, set goals, decide on programming, and determine how to best build an entrepreneurial network in which all can thrive.
Our Mosaic community is a self-sustaining ecosystem where student-led organizations act as “guilds,” providing specialized pro bono services for Northeastern founders. These organizations include Scout to create logos and branding, NUMA for marketing, Huntington Angels Network to provide capital access, NUImpact to create impact investing opportunities, and Generate for prototyping. The impact of these organizations is seen outside of Northeastern as in this Financial Times review about NUImpact and what it sees as a growing trend in Business Education. In this way, our ecosystem members engage as learners, builders, mentors, founders, and/or supporters, plugging in as appropriate for wherever they are in their innovation journeys. This has resulted in an exciting phenomenon in which students who provided services for ventures, themselves go on to become innovators, and hire Mosaic organizations to work on their ventures.
By creating an ecosystem where students are constantly learning from and with one another, we have established a culture of life-long learning that sets them up for future success. Students quickly learn the importance of being decent individuals who collaborate and work well with others, and that they, individually, don’t have all the answers. The experience of navigating a student-led ecosystem with all its relationships and working in teams within the context of real ventures provides the students with advanced experiential entrepreneurship opportunities not widely available on college campuses. As members of a community, students develop soft skills including leadership, entrepreneurial mindsets, conflict resolution, empathy, creativity, listening, grit, and confidence. LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends Report surveyed talent professionals and hiring managers and found that 92% say soft skills matter as much as or more than hard skills and 89% say that bad hires usually lack soft skills. Amidst the increasing acknowledgement of the importance of soft skills, the robust toolkit Northeastern students develop within our ecosystem gives them an advantage crucial to success within our campus and beyond.
The student experience at Northeastern rests upon the principle that students understand best what they want and need to succeed in our entrepreneurship ecosystem, demonstrating the importance that they be the ones driving the programming content. The role of faculty and staff is to provide support and guidance that ensures everything is a learning opportunity. Our philosophy is to let the students drive, though there will absolutely be bumps and they may veer into the roadside gravel, our goal is to keep them from falling in a ditch. Realistically, however, ideas fail and students may “fall in a ditch.” Thus, it is important that we create a space where the students “fail safely” with a robust support system and follow-up to reflect on the lesson.
The student-led experiential entrepreneurship ecosystem at Northeastern traces its success to its emphasis on grassroots culture. Mosaic organizations are often developed by students who see a gap in the entrepreneurial offerings and take the lead in filling it. IDEA, the student-led venture accelerator, began when students discussed their desire for a structured venture support system on campus and recruited Professor Dan Gregory, a staunch believer in student-led experiential entrepreneurship, as an advisor. The students began to list resources they identified as crucial to their success and built IDEA from there. One powerful resource often utilized by IDEA is the McCarthy(s) Venture Mentoring Network, which creates impactful, lasting connections between founders and subject experts to aid venture growth. In its 14 years of operation, IDEA has supported 2,600+ venture concepts, granted $2.5 million+ in non-equity grants to students, staff, faculty, and alumni, and the portfolio of companies has raised over $890 million in venture capital and private-equity funding.
At Northeastern University, we firmly believe in giving students the creative freedom, internal support structures, culture, community, and resources necessary to enable them as leaders of creating transformational change. By empowering the students to ideate and launch the programming that will best serve their wants and needs, they have created a tight-knit community of like-minded innovators and peers that uplift and support one another no matter where they are in their entrepreneurial journeys.
Chanler, M., Dye, C., Coppinger, C., Nieh, G., Maris, T., Keyser, B., & McGill, K. (2019). Global Talent Trends: The 4 trends transforming your workplace. LinkedIn Talent Solutions. business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/talent-solutions/resources/pdfs/global-talent-trends-2019.pdf
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Image credit: Mosaic, Northeastern University