July 17, 2015, Day 10:
Brian Lam and Tchnavia Merrick
We visited a business incubator on Varick Street, which was set up by NYU at New York City’s request to support startups for NYU alumni and other city residents. We met with Steven Kuyan, who explained the startup process and raising capital. Furthermore, he taught us the differences between accelerators and incubators. He shared with us many of the pitfalls and obstacles facing startups. Paul Russo then spent some time discussing the vocabulary of intellectual property and the practical aspects of patents and copyrights for small startup companies. We also met with two entrepreneurs at the incubator, one differentiating books for different levels of learners at booksthatgrow.com, and another offering JavaScript tutorials for use in multimedia applications at vidcode.io. After lunch, teachers revised their business plans that were later pitched to the larger group. With feedback from colleagues, we were able to further develop our plans to potentially market our products. Although the ideas of all of the teachers were fabulous, we walked through the procedure so that we can teach our students as well as possibly being entrepreneurs ourselves. Afterwards, Edward Rogoff, Dean of the School of Business, Public Administration, and Information Sciences at LIU, shared with us how to implement entrepreneurship in our classrooms. He emphasized that entrepreneurship contextualizes learning and engages students to do research, conduct interviews, become better writers, and make something and scale it down. Overall, how do we get students to become entrepreneurs, we need to just do it.