What is entrepreneurship anyway?

Before IMSA, I thought business was suit and tie negotiations, all profit based, and all the stodginess you’d expect from a 9 to 5 job. But business has come to mean so much more, and as of late, it has been trending towards entrepreneurship.  The definition is flexible at IMSA, but I’ll take the liberty of defining it as solving a problem by creating a solution that uses business principles. An entrepreneur is someone who takes the risky initiative to bring something new to the palette.

Why do we need entrepreneurship?

Under the Wikipedia page for IMSA there is a section called Notable Alumni, and most of these people are entrepreneurs.

Acknowledging that achieving scientific recognition is a much heftier task than making it big in the entrepreneurial world, it’s hard to look over the fact that entrepreneurship can lead to great things. IMSA preaches exploration and inquiry, but it’s high time for an era of innovation. We’ve already started  with the Innovation Hub, and I have hopes that it will end up being a place where students can indeed collaborate to create.

Worries are that entrepreneurship is not STEM enough and as a STEM academy, we should be promoting research more and not wasting our time with business. But I make the case that entrepreneurism  goes further and applies STEM principles. The Lean Startup is the scientific method transferred to  business principles where entrepreneurs use learning through experimentation to help their businesses grow. Tech startups are the main source of entrepreneurial spirit and take up the major part of the network. Engineering at its core is creating solutions to problems which is the fundamental premise of a startup. No field can survive without math,  especially enterprises concerned with profit. Entrepreneurship is valid because it’s an application of the cores of STEM

Why do we need the entrepreneurial spirit at IMSA?

Injecting IMSA with the entrepreneurial vibe can only bring about more creation and innovation. As an example, the creation of Social Entrepreneurship as a LEAD elective raised enough money through an initiative called Game On! to fund the restoration of the chess set in IMSA’s Old Caf. Another example of innovation at IMSA is Wikiroster, a website created by IMSA alumni Jason Lin (’13) that allows students to view who’s in their classes. Through Power Pitch, TALENT’s entrepreneurial contest, Wikiroster was given a jump start. IMSA remains one of its biggest users. The utility of Wikiroster has even become evident to IMSA’s College Academic Counselors (CACs), who recommend using it and have said it makes their lives easier when students know exactly how to navigate the courses. These ventures would have never been brought to fruition if it hadn’t been for the growing entrepreneurial spirit. If that movement grew, the scale of the outcomes and positive impacts on our environment can far surpass imagination.