EntrepreNews Summer 2019

EntrepreNews

Summer 2019

Greetings Alumni and Friends of the Weinert Center,

Across the globe, entrepreneurship can take many forms and great entrepreneurs come from an even wider range of backgrounds. This is also very true at UW-Madison and the stories in this newsletter provide great examples of the wide range of ideas and students that we have the opportunity to work with in our classes, competitions, and events. The students range from the incoming freshmen who live in the StartUp Learning Community to the graduate students and post-docs who attended our 13th Morgridge Entrepreneurial Bootcamp. Students from across the entire campus are involved in the different competitions and the long-running WAVE class. We are happy to share stories about all of these topics in this newsletter.

This fall we are welcoming a new Dean for the Wisconsin School of Business and a new Faculty Director for the Weinert Center. Dr. Vallabh “Samba” Sambamurthy started as Dean in early August and he brings a very accomplished academic and professional background. We are very much looking forward to working with him and you can learn more about him in this newsletter. In addition, Professor Martin Ganco will be taking over from Professor Jon Eckhardt as the Faculty Director of the Weinert Center. Martin joined the UW in 2015 and is a very popular entrepreneurship instructor at both the undergraduate and graduate level. He is also the Executive Director of the Initiative for Studies in Transformational Entrepreneurship (INSITE) and one of the co-organizing instructors for the Morgridge Entrepreneurial Bootcamp (MEB). In our next newsletter we will provide more information on his background and many accomplishments.

We would also like to thank Jon for his wonderful leadership over the years. During his tenure the Center launched the Wisconsin Entrepreneurial Showcase, Distinguished Entrepreneurship Lunch program and the Business and Entrepreneurship Clinic. At the same time, the number of students enrolled in our classes has more than doubled. Jon has played a key role in expanding entrepreneurship both at the UW and across Wisconsin. In addition to Jon’s ongoing teaching and research, he will be taking on a new role as a Discovery Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (full story in this newsletter).

Please join me in thanking Jon and in welcoming both Martin and Samba to their new roles.

On Wisconsin!

Dan

Dan Olszewski
Director, Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship
Wisconsin School of Business