Facilitator of Enterprise Creation in the Mid-Atlantic Region

“Our mission is to make entrepreneurship accessible by offering resources that take a person through the whole life cycle of starting a business. We want students to experience business success, and we do this by actively supporting student-run enterprises, offering events that bring regional entrepreneurs and students together, and becoming a focal point for developing campus-wide entrepreneurial activities.”

—Asher Epstein, MBA ’04, Immediate Past Managing Director,
Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship

The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship is a top-tier entrepreneurial institute recognized around the world as a leader in enterprise creation. The Dingman Center is continuously pushing the boundaries of teaching and learning with its focus on practical entrepreneurship, global innovation and international classroom experiences. The Center promotes opportunities that provide maximum resources to start-up businesses in terms of ideation, execution and financing; and that support its mission to take entrepreneurs “from the back of a napkin to the first $1 million in financing.”

“It takes entrepreneurs to instill an entrepreneurial culture,” says entrepreneur and Dingman Center Founder and former Smith School of Business Dean Rudy Lamone. In 1986, when Lamone set out to establish an entrepreneurial support center for the business school, he found a willing partner in Michael D. Dingman, founder of the Signal Corporation, now part of Honeywell International. With a generous grant from Mr. Dingman, the Dingman Center emerged as a top-ranked entrepreneurship center due to the efforts of Dr. Lamone and future directors Charles Heller (1990-1999), and Don Spero (2000-2004). Both Heller and Lamone were recipients of the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur-of-the-Year award for their work in support of entrepreneurship, the first time in the history of the awards that two individuals from the same organization were honored. Under the leadership of Asher Epstein (2004-2012), the Dingman Center continued as a global catalyst in the evolving arena of entrepreneurship practice.

The Dingman Center’s History of 'Firsts'

• The Center's Dingman Center Angels was the first to bring regional start-up companies seeking early-stage funding to the angel investing community and is the largest university-run angel investor network.
• The Dingman Center was among the first to create and teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the field of entrepreneurship.
• The Dingman Center developed some of the first courses in business biotechnology and technology entrepreneurship.
• The Dingman Center was the first to organize a national meeting of leading entrepreneurship centers in the U.S., thus creating the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC), a 200+ member organization.
• The Dingman Center was the first to provide workshops, seminars, and training programs for the regional entrepreneurial community.
• The Dingman Center was among the first recipients of Kaufman and Coleman Foundation grants to support the Center's programs.
• The Dingman Center was the first center on campus to establish faculty summer research awards.
• It is the only Center where two of its leaders have received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
• The Dingman Center was the first of 5 Centers chosen to receive the NASDAQ award for Center of Excellence in Entrepreneurship.