NJIT Opens New Center, Expands Opportunities for Undergrads in Entrepreneurship

The Center for Student Entrepreneurship, newly created at New Jersey Institute of Technology, will centralize and grow the university’s resources that expose students to the spirit and skills necessary to think in an innovative mindset.

Other entrepreneurship resources at NJIT also welcome undergraduates, but until now these students have not had a center focused solely on them, explained Kathy Naasz, executive director of student entrepreneurship. She is also a research professor in NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management.

“We have a strong foundation already at NJIT. We're ranked top 50 in student entrepreneurship. And we're taking it and amplifying it, to ignite the entrepreneurial spirit earlier. Our mission is to radically increase access to and participation in entrepreneurial efforts and learning for all NJIT students,” Naasz said.

“The Center for Student Entrepreneurship embodies NJIT’s commitment to providing students with hands-on, real-world experiences,” said John Pelesko, university provost. “We are empowering the next generation to turn their ideas into impactful ventures and to apply entrepreneurial skills to their careers. Our students will leave NJIT ready not just to participate in the economy, but to shape its future.”

NJIT’s existing entrepreneurship Initiatives include the Center for Translational Research, emphasizing commercialization of faculty intellectual property; Innovation Corps, based around research funding from the National Science Foundation that’s usually at the graduate student level; New Jersey Innovation Acceleration Center, focused on training anyone in the North Jersey region; Paul Profeta Community Entrepreneurship Program, delivering workshops to underserved business founders in Newark; and Venture Studio, formerly known as Venturelink, providing existing startup companies with incubation resources from NJIT’s New Jersey Innovation Institute.

The new center’s emphasis on undergraduates will increase hands-on learning opportunities through a program called the entrepreneurial experience. Students will have the chance to intern at a startup company, have an entrepreneurship course count toward their majors and earn a digital badge by participating in events such as a startup pitch or showcase. In addition, the center will coordinate entrepreneurship courses between NJIT’s six colleges. They’ve also built a Startup AI Assistant tool, which uses custom prompts to assess business ideas from a market perspective.

Everyone has the entrepreneurial spirit in them. It needs to be ignited.

Naasz stressed that even if students aren’t looking to form companies, the same skills will be useful if they someday look to affect change in an established organization. “We are broadening our reach with a holistic entrepreneurial experience. It is not only about venture creation, we are guiding our students to think like entrepreneurs and see opportunities. I like to say that we are focused on shared learnings, rather than shared earnings," she noted.

Another new offering for students is open entrepreneurship hours, held every Wednesday from 3-5 p.m. in the Leir Business Data Observatory on the second floor of Van Houten Library. Naasz and colleagues will provide mentorship there, in conjunction with the student-led Entrepreneur Society. Student successes in recent years include several projects that were funded by NJIT’s commitment to the NSF Innovation Corps. Meanwhile a current MTSM student, Jordan-River Samuel, is hosting an event this month at Newark Tech Week.

Natalie Kiwanian, a junior from Upper Saddle River, is a mechanical engineering major with a minor in innovation and entrepreneurship. She’s secretary of the Entrepreneur Society and is excited about new opportunities that may arise from the Center.

“My parents are entrepreneurs themselves, running a tech business and a resale business. And it's always been a curiosity for me, that maybe I would start my own business one day,” Kiwanian said. She signed up for Naasz’ Introduction to Entrepreneurship course and found it very helpful to her career goals. “Going through the process of finding an idea, asking other students about it, it really made me appreciate the efforts that bigger companies had to go through to create an idea. Even small startups and local businesses, there's a lot of planning behind it, and it just seemed like a really cool thing to be an entrepreneur and basically foster a company from scratch.

“I think it's nice that it's directly targeting undergrads, just because all these students, they’re in engineering, architecture — they may not have as much time to be doing these things and finding this information on their own. This is for me. You kind of expect as an undergrad that graduate students are doing these big and grand things.”

Kiwanian, an NJIT Profeta Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fellow, is interested in building a mobile application that considers the ingredients you have in your kitchen and then uses artificial intelligence to suggest what you can cook from them. “I wouldn’t consider it a million-dollar idea, but it is something that I think can help a lot of people,” she said. “I call it Cookin’ Cubby.”

“I really, really believe this, that everyone has the entrepreneurial spirit in them. It needs to be ignited,” Naasz said. “We are a diverse, tech-focused student body. So once we ignite that spirit, as their worldview expands, they're going to see more opportunities, and through the skills they gained here, they can solve the world’s problems.”