UWM students act on entrepreneurial ideas

Where do you start to bring a promising product or business idea from concept to reality? Turns out, you don’t even have to leave campus.

The goal of the UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship Center is to make entrepreneurship an integral part of the UWM experience. The Ideas Challenge is the name of the center’s programming, which is designed to involve students in all disciplines and at many levels. Students can take both “pop-up” workshops and Ideas Challenge courses, existing courses that have been redesigned to use experiential learning models and entrepreneurial themes.

Twenty-seven teams are participating in the Student Startup Challenge, which has evolved from a product-idea competition to a yearlong mentoring process. During the first phase, teams learn the “lean launch” approach to entrepreneurship by participating in the Student I-Corps program. If they continue with the program, teams will be ready to compete in the New Ventures Business Plan Competition, hosted by the Lubar School of Business and supported by La Macchia Enterprises.