Changes

Clubs are a driving force for entrepreneurship on campus - unsurprising, as UC Davis currently fosters more than 800 student clubs. Notable examples of clubs on campus that encourage entrepreneurship include the Business Career and Networking Club, the Start-up Hub, Net Impact Davis, the Society for Women Engineers, Consult Your Community, the Davis Consulting Group, Design for America, and various business fraternities, to name just a few. Campus organizations also have a sizeable presence, with organizations such as the Student Academic Success Center, the California Aggie, Aggie Studios, the Internship and Career Center, the Center for Leadership Learning, the Undergraduate Research Center, and most notably, the Student Startup Center standing out from the crowd. The Student Startup Center is a particularly effective hub in this space - it’s one main entrepreneurial program is PLASMA, a program for undergraduate and graduate students alike to incubate their ideas. Many of these organizations on campus not only give students the chance to learn more about innovation and entrepreneurship, but provide them with an environment to apply their learning through hands-on projects - the inclusion of 3D printers for prototyping free of charge (courtesy of the Student Startup Center) has aided in such efforts. In addition to these on campus clubs and organizations, several classes geared towards entrepreneurship are offered at UC Davis - examples include Design Thinking for Food, Agribusiness Marketing Plan Development, Marketing for the Technology-Based Enterprise, and Financing New Business Ventures. UC Davis hosts several events as well that help stimulate an entrepreneurial spirit on campus: hackathons are held by clubs such as HackDavis, Information sessions on a wide variety of topics are given at the Memorial Union, and welcome events are set up to help integrate out-of-state and international students with the campus culture. Last year, the business school piloted an event called the “Aggie Innovation Symposium,” geared towards exposing students and other community/campus members to startups, innovation resources, and entrepreneurial activity in the Sacramento Region. Academic departments supportive of student entrepreneurship efforts include the Design Department, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Science, and the department of Electrical Engineering, all of which have a number of professors currently engaged with various innovation and entrepreneurship ventures in some way.

Several faculty members at UC Davis are a part of the Davis Entrepreneurship Network (DEN for short) - a network formed to promote innovation and entrepreneurship at UC Davis. As a cross-campus collaboration of UC Davis entities (and a network largely unknown to undergraduates), DEN serves as one of the primary channels of communication for faculty members interested in entrepreneurship. The Blum Center for Developing Economies, the Center for Integrated Computing and STEM Education, the Center for Science and Innovation Studies, CITRIS and the Banato Institute, the Clinical and Translational Science Center, the Energy Efficiency Center, the Innovation Institute for Food and Health, the Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Program for International Energy Technologies are all connected to DEN. Several makerspaces are available as well to help both students and faculty members looking to experiment with their ideas; among these are the Beta-Lab, BME TEAM Lab, and the MASTeR LabModLab. Finally, faculty members have been increasingly encouraged to interface with both students and other faculty members who are interested in supporting or creating entrepreneurial ventures and startups. Several competitions and funding programs exist to support this goal - among these include the Big Bang! Business Competition, the Blum Center for Developing Economies Grants, the CITRIS Tech for Social Good, Hack Davis, Science Translation and Innovative Research (STAIR) Grants, the PLASMA Accelerator, and Data, Informations & Application Launch (DIAL) Grants. The UC Davis Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship as well as UC Entrepreneurship Academy (both discussed below) also serve as highly valuable resources for faculty members looking to reach outside of their academic bubbles and pursue entrepreneurial projects while still remaining grounded in the UC Davis sphere.