JIM MORAN SCHOOL
Fiorito, director of the Jim Moran school. “Mrs. Moran’s gift was not only generous but also very insightful as to what our community needed to support entrepreneurship.” School officials tout the Jim Moran school as a resource for all students, not only for entrepreneurship majors. Any FSU student can apply to become a member of the school’s business incubator, where they can attend presentations on areas such as accounting, finance, marketing and law. “It’s my goal to be able to touch every student on this campus with some entrepreneurial idea, to give them access to ideas and people and competitions and classes, maybe workshops,” Fiorito said. Molly Cloonan, an economics major who graduated in May, said she had no interest in staring her own business in the spring of 2017, when her academic adviser suggested a course on social entrepreneurship. She came out of it with her own business: Social Safe, an app, aims to prevent sexual violence on college campuses. “Of all of the classes that I took at FSU, it was by far the most effective class I had because it was a lot more personal and a lot more hands-on,” Cloonan said. “I always tell people that I basically got a degree in entrepreneurship.” The social entrepreneurship course directed students to identify a social problem and to build a product to help solve it. Creators of the top three products competed in a businesspitch competition, which Cloonan won. She said professors Mark McNees,
founder of RedEye Coffee and an entrepreneur in residence at the school, and Sam Staley, who wrote a book on sexual assault at colleges, helped her with a business plan and with her business-pitch preparation. Then, through an individual study course with McNees, she said, she learned how to register her business and made contact with lawyers and tech-industry players, including a graphic designer. Along the way, she won awards and prize money. Cloonan’s app helps potential victims of sexual assault to contact friends and family before a situation escalates. It gathers audio and video evidence and includes GPS features that help law enforcement locate a potential victim. Success stories from the Jim Moran school’s first year also included, among others: ■ a group of students who won $15,000 in one competition for DiaTech, a biotechnology company that focuses on diabetes care; ■ Hannah King, recipient of a national Future Founders fellowship after she created Woven Futures, which supports indigenous Guatemalan women in craft making and sales; ■ Jessica Bachansingh, who won the Most Viable business prize for Gifts for Confidence, which teaches young Ethiopian women how to sew infinity scarves that they can market and sell. The Jim Moran school offers majors in retail entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship
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and commercial entrepreneurship. Fiorito said the school is pondering whether to let students build their own majors. “I think we need to be innovative and HANNAH creative in how we’re KING growing,” she said. The school’s new location, which keeps undergraduate students on campus, includes 31 offices, a student-collaboration room, two labs and a conference room. JESSICA Fiorito said the BACHANSINGH downtown location will continue to host speakers and statewide competitions. She said it also soon could house a graduate entrepreneurship program. “It’s been an absolutely amazing experience being a part of a college startup that’s actually an entrepreneurship school,” said McNees, the RedEye founder and entrepreneur in residence. “It’s been fast and furious like all of the other startups I’ve been part of — creating systems and curriculum and pivoting and learning along the way. We’ve had some amazing success out of the gate.”
PHOTOS BY KAITLIN ERICA PHOTOGRAPHY AND KYLIE ZAMARTI (KING)
Faculty member Mark McNees engages students in a classroom at the Jim Moran School of Entrepreneurship. At right, students John Wilcox and Nicholas Cooper display an award won in a competition sponsored by a biotechnology company.