I always wanted to write about it. I don’t remember anyone talking about this aspect in the blogs.(pardon me if I missed) We all look for jobs when we graduate from our universities. Specially in higher education, after finishing Masters and PHD we look for jobs in industry or faculty position in some universities or may be research scientist in a prestigious lab or even a post-doc. Al this is fine, but do we ever think of having our own company? having our own ideas patented, offering new products to the society? Do we ever think in those lines?
I think a lot of us do but only a very very very very few entertain such thoughts because it is a high risk high return endeavor. We love to have financial security which comes with a fixed job. Entrepreneurship however requires risk taking, improvising, understanding the business side and having vision and foresight. I came to know recently that VT offers a lot of free services which student can use like attorneys etc.Students interested in setting up a start-up company can use these services to come up with writing proposals and grants. They can also help to file a patent. The language in a patent is kind of tricky. So it is useful to use their help. There are lots of other things required for successfully setting up a start-up company. For international students, the financial aspect is also complicated due to their visa status (20 hours per week and that’s it).
What do you think about this?
Are you talking about VTIP, VT KnowledgeWorks, or both? I haven’t worked at all with VTIP as my research isn’t something I can spin off, but having taken a short course on entrepreneurship from KnowledgeWorks, I can vouch for the brilliance of Jim Flowers and Dick Daugherty over there. They have a lot of experience launching businesses, doing market research, and connecting you with legal and business help. You can set up a free consultation with Jim flowers through http://www.vtknowledgeworks.com, and he also has office hours on campus. I don’t mean to sound like an advertisement, but they’ve helped me a lot with my business plans so I thought it would be useful information to anyone interested in entrepreneurship. Also don’t forget, you can always find co-founders to round out any of your weak spots; you don’t have to know everything yourself!
I was talking about VTIP. Thanks so much for sharing the information. It is indeed helpful. I agree that we don’t have to know everything. We can simply use the existing expertise of the people there. I will definitely look this up.