PARSONS ENTREPRENEURIAL LAB
ELAB IS A DESIGN-LED BUSINESS LAB THAT IS DEDICATED TO THE RESEARCH AND PRACTICE OF DESIGN-LED IMPACT ENTREPRENEURSHIP.
Design and Management (the fastest growing graduate program, launched in 2012) where approx 30% of the graduates develop business ideas they wish to launch after graduation. It is within this context and discourse that the Parsons Entrepreneurial Lab (http://sds.parsons. edu/elab/) was born in the school of SDS to cater to recent alum from the 4 graduate programs as a lab to develop programs, research, and support mechanisms for entrepreneurship within our community. The Elab’s concept was build upon an external partnership Desis Lab and Dean Mears forged between CSI (centre for social innovation) and Parsons’ School of Design Strategies to award hots seats to students in graduate programs. In 2014, Professor Rhea Alexander was asked to manage the program as part of the external partnership committee. Building upon this relationship, coupled with practices emerging from the new collaborative economy and inspiration from distributed business models, Professor Alexander developed proposal for a new type of academic business incubator during her research that would potentially be low cost and fill a growing need at the university. The relationship with CSI was leveraged and expanded to create a pilot program whose objectives were to award hot seats in sector specific co-working communities and incubators across the city with an integrated support program that involved individualized mentorship, benchmarks and roadmaps, community, workshops and support in the critical first year of inception of businesses. At the end of 2014, Alexander was awarded funds from the Dan and Gloria Bohan Foundation and the School of Design Strategies to build and test the initial framework through 2015 and again in 2016 and the Parsons Entrepreneurial Lab was founded. The Parsons Entrepreneurial Lab (ELab) was designed to address an emergent need to bridge the academic experience with applied practice for graduate students at Parsons School of Design, to help transition them from student to successful entrepreneurs and changemakers.
| ELAB REPORT 2016 |
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