Student entrepreneurs thrive at UO | News
Lundquist’s Center for Entrepreneurship has helped students with a passion for entrepreneurship bring their business ideas to life.
The Center for Entrepreneurship has developed the Oregon Innovation Challenge, which offers students and faculty workshops, mentorship and funding opportunities for their business ideas. The OIC program runs from January to April.
Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship Jeff Sorensen said that the OIC offers entrepreneurs up to $10,000 for their business ideas. He said the funding for the Center and the OIC has come from gifts and donations from the last year and a half, including a $10 million gift from the estate of Gerry and Marilyn Cameron.
“Everyone has things they care about. Everyone is creative, inherently, but there’s a lot of people that think they’re not an entrepreneur and self-doubt that people definitely do feel,” Sorensen said. “And so we just tried to really make it as welcoming and encouraging as possible for people.”
According to Sorensen, the OIC and the Center for Entrepreneurship are a good place for students and faculty to come to with their early ideas, no matter how fragile they may be.
“We just want to be an encouraging place where you can meet other people who are trying to do the same thing,” Sorensen said. “It’s hard to build something if you’re just isolated.”
Jeff Sorensen and other affiliates discuss potential entrepreneurs to feature for their noteworthy contributions to their respective businesses. Launch Oregon Entrepreneurship & its Members, Eugene, on Feb 28, 2024. (Eddie Bruning/Emerald)
One way that the Center provides support for student entrepreneurs is through workshops that are hosted on Sunday mornings.
According to Sorensen, the workshops vary in purpose, but the Center has hosted groups who are coming together to meet fellow entrepreneurs and has also hosted students who are coming to the Center for the first time with initial business ideas.
“We just create opportunities for people to reflect on what they’re doing, set goals and share them with other people to create some amount of structure,” Sorensen said. “Because one of the hardest things about building your own [business] is there’s no structure.”
Mentorship sessions are also a way for students to get further support for their entrepreneurial ideas.
“Three teams will sit around a table with a few mentors for an hour and each team will get to talk for 15 minutes about what they’re working through,” Sorensen said. “Everyone will kind of workshop [the idea] with them and help them think through things.”
Senior and Founder of KPB Designs Karly Bierma is a current member of the Center for Entrepreneurship, OIC and the Entrepreneurship Club.
Bierma has created her own business, KPB Designs, where she sells her artwork on stickers, greeting cards, apparel and other gift items.
“I was 17 and I had been selling my artwork originals in coffee shops, farmers markets and stuff like that, but I wanted a way to share my artwork to a wider audience,” Bierma said. “I also wanted to figure out a way to scale that as a business because I loved the business aspect along with creating artwork.”
Multiple members of the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship gather around to check on a recent project. Launch Oregon Entrepreneurship & its Members, Eugene, on Feb 28, 2024. (Eddie Bruning/Emerald)
According to Bierma, she then began creating and selling stickers and greeting cards that landed in gift shops in her hometown of Aurora, Ore.
“I was realizing the potential for this business and got connected to a sales rep and they’re the people who connect the product to the stores…” Bierma said. “…I was super lucky in getting connected with a woman who does that with artists and the PNW.”
According to Bierma, within the first year of starting business with a sales representative, she had 150 accounts with retail stores, and she now has 450 accounts.
“I love what I do and I’m excited to take it after I graduate,” Bierma said. “But I think with starting this business younger, there was this gap to where I had mentors who were a lot older than me.”
According to Bierma, her mother and father own their own respective businesses, but she did not have someone her age to resonate with. Coming to UO changed that for her.
“When we got back on campus sophomore year [post-COVID-19], that was really when we started to see the need for an entrepreneurship group on campus,” Bierma said. “Fall of my sophomore year, I came together with two of my friends and we relaunched the Entrepreneurship Club.”
According to Bierma, when Sorensen came to UO in her junior year, that is when the center grew into the OIC and a new energy was brought to the entrepreneurial audience.
“[The Center] provided me with, above all, a community, and I’ve met a lot of my closest friends within that group,” Bierma said. “I’ve also had continued encouragement to pursue my passion as a job because I think there’s an overarching pressure to go corporate, especially after going into a university setting.”
According to Sorensen, he and the Center are working to make students confident in themselves as entrepreneurs.
“There’s so much potential,” Sorensen said. “The super exciting [ideas] are when you’re getting people starting to think of themselves as entrepreneurs who maybe previously wouldn’t have.”
