Your financial support for our entrepreneurship program is making a difference!  

In the latest rankings of the Top Schools for Entrepreneurship in 2019, the Princeton Review has highly ranked our programs.

• UTD’s graduate innovation and entrepreneurship program is ranked #11 in the U.S., moving up from 8 places from #19 in last year’s ranking.  https://www.princetonreview.com/business-school-rankings?rankings=top-25-entrepreneurship-grad

• UTD’s undergraduate innovation and entrepreneurship program is ranked #23 in the U.S.  This is the first time our undergraduate program has been ranked in the top 25 by the Princeton Review.     https://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings?rankings=top-25-entrepreneurship-ugrad

Madison Pedigo, director of the innovation and entrepreneurship academic programs at the Jindal School, commented that “the rankings are a result of a focus on continuous improvement and teamwork, including partnering with the local community and our alumni”.

“Each year, we improve our program in multiple dimensions,” he said.  “This includes adding exciting new courses, increasing student enrollments, and improving our already outstanding support programs, such as Blackstone LaunchPad and the Big Idea Competition.”  

More than 300 schools that offer undergraduate and/or graduate entrepreneurship majors, minors, concentrations or degree programs participated in the 60-question Princeton ranking survey. The methodology for determining the rankings analyzed data points such as the number and amounts of scholarships, competitions and amount of prizes, mentorship programs, number of alumni startups and amount of funding raised, course options, student enrollments, number of entrepreneurship-related faculty and courses, and student and faculty entrepreneurship activity.

What are some of the unique aspects of UTD’s Graduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program?  Here are just a few.

1. Twenty eight state-of-the-art graduate level entrepreneurship courses (including two PhD courses).  15 undergraduate entrepreneurship courses.
2. A heavy emphasis on “experienced-based learning”.
   1. Seed Fund Support Course where students work as “venture associates” and make investment recommendations to UTD’s $300K+  Seed Fund Investment Committee.
   2. Innovative startup launch courses where students work on their startups with mentoring and funding of up to $25K per student team.
   3. Social Entrepreneurship course where students partner with multiple local nonprofits on real projects to help the nonprofits.
   4. Innovative “Entrepreneurial Experience Course” where students work on a market or technology analysis for a large partner company (such as analyzing how the Internet of Things will impact digital solutions in AT&T’s supply chain).
   5. Comet-X accelerator program which is led by a successful entrepreneur.  This is coupled with mentoring by UTD’s Blackstone staff, volunteers from the local entrepreneurial community, and UTD’s IE faculty.
   6. Multiple other experiential courses and programs.    
3. Close  partnering with the external entrepreneurial community including hosting joint programs, scheduling regular drop-in office hours for industry mentoring, and hosting Startup Internship and Career Fairs.
4. The IIE hosts multiple outstanding events each semester!  Recent examples include the Emerging Technologies Summit in April 2018 and the first inaugural Women’s’ Summit in October 2018.  Both featured world class speakers with over 300 participants each.
5. UTD and UTD alumni startups continue to excel!  Examples include winning 1st place ($1M prize) in the 76 West Clean Energy Competition (Skyven), winning $250K at the 2018 Good Demo Day (ShearShare), and winning Best Customer Experience Solution at ReMode (Everthread) in December 2018.       
6. UTD’s program is continuing to grow!  Graduate entrepreneurship enrollments grew over 25% from last year.   We are expanding the UTD incubator by more than 50% to 20 KNSF.