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Dingman Center for
Entrepreneurship Luncheon & Research Awards Ceremony
Date: April 22,
2009 Time: 12:00-1:15 p.m. Location: Executive Dining Room 2517 Van
Munching Hall Register:
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Bob Baum will summarize new Smith entrepreneurship
research and present the Smith Best Entrepreneurship
Paper awards.
Lori Kiyatkin, PhD
Candidate, will discuss: Employee Health: A Value Creating Organizational
Resource U.S. businesses have overwhelmingly approached
employee health from a cost management, rather than
investment, perspective. This singular focus on
costs is likely due to lack of clarity regarding the
potential of employee health to be a value creating
organizational resource and the underlying
mechanisms by which health may be subject to
organizational influence. We outline businesses’
potential to build employee health and empirically
demonstrate its potential to be a crucially
important value creating resource from an
organizational performance perspective. As such, we
assert that employee healthcare is ‘strategic’
social performance in the sense that it
simultaneously promotes firm outcomes and public
health. The implications for entrepreneurs and
public policy are discussed.
Yuntao Dong, PhD
Student, will discuss: Coaching to Win: The Venture Capitalist as a
Coach In this paper, we take an executive coaching
perspective to examine the non-financial
relationship between venture capitalists and
entrepreneurs. Specifically, we propose that venture
capitalist’s coaching behavior is translated into
entrepreneurial effectiveness through the
enhancement of entrepreneurial self-efficacy and
adaptability. In addition, when the entrepreneur
trusts his/her venture capitalist, the coaching will
be more likely to increase the entrepreneurial
self-efficacy and adaptability, therefore leading to
favorable venture outcomes. The theoretical
contributions to the entrepreneurship literature and
the executive coaching literature, as well as the
practical implications of the model are also
discussed.
HCIL &
Dingman Seminar Series
Date: April 24 & 27,
2009 Time: 11:00 a.m. Location: 2119 Hornbake Library (South Wing)
On Monday, April 24th and Monday, April 27th, the HCIL, in partnership with the Dingman Center, will
be having two great Seminar Series Speakers:
April 24: Mary
Czerwinski from Microsoft Research will be
joining us to give a talk on Computing
Everywhere: Visualization and Interaction
Research at MSR
April 27: Joe Marks
from Disney Research will be joining us to give
a talk on The What and How of Technological
Research at The Walt Disney Company
For more information
including abstracts and bios, please visit the
website.
Congratulations to Kären
Olson
Congratulations
to Kären
Olson, CEO of
BioMarker Strategies
and Entrepreneur-in-Residence, for winning the
Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC)'s 2009 "Leadership
in BioScience Award." In announcing the award,
the GBC cited Ms. Olson’s leadership role in guiding
the company's operations and R&D program, including
the development of its novel SnapPath (TM) live
tumor cell testing system.
The full press release
can be found on BioMarker Strategies'
website.
The competition was tight and the
judges were unable to award the full $2500 to
only one team, but they did choose a top winner
to receive $1500 in seed funding. The judges
agreed to award the top prize to Adam Van
Wagner, a University of Maryland undergraduate
student, for his business, Fairview Enterprises.
Fairview aims to provide the lowest rental and
rent-to-own services in the DC area and
specializes in providing affordable rental
televisions to the residents of local nursing
homes. Fairview currently has a successful
partnership with one local nursing home and is
looking to acquire investment capital to expand
operations to similar institutions in the area.
DMVsavvy.com ($700 Award):
The judges awarded Donald Whitaker
with $700 for second place with his business
proposition,
DMVsavvy.com, a
website dedicated to the local urban
entertainment scene in the D.C., Maryland and
Virginia Metro Area (DMV). The site aims to be
the premium medium and leading source for local
entertainment and the related lifestyle. DMV
Savvy will enable local entertainers to better
reach their audience and encourage user
interaction through message boards, content
blogs and ratings, and media downloads.
Legal River ($550 Award):
The judges also awarded $300 to the
third place winner, Reed Atkin, for his business
concept,
Legal River, an
online marketplace to help lawyers and
businesses connect. Legal River also received
$250 by winning the Audience Choice Award. Legal
River is a simple, secure and intuitive online
platform where small and mid-sized businesses
can solicit, compare, review and contact
lawyers. The website provides a free service to
business that empowers them to find the right
lawyer, and will enable lawyers to effectively
reach out to businesses in need of legal
services. Legal River’s founders expect to take
advantage of the current market gap and current
economic environment that has created a
significant demand for new clients among law
offices.
"ONE
SUMMER DAY IN 2007, two 20-something computer geeks
set out to test a new brand of wireless Internet
router in an apartment building in Brookline, Mass.
Convinced that most
commercially available routers were costly and
inefficient, Ken Carnesi and Jonathan Rust had
discovered an equipment line manufactured by the
California startup Meraki. With a few strategically
placed Meraki routers and a little experimentation,
they built an ad hoc network that enabled them to
get online from just about anywhere in Jonathan's
20-unit building.
That success was crucial to the
genesis of
Anaptyx, the
environmentally friendly wireless networking company
that Ken and Jonathan launched a few weeks later.
With wireless technology expanding quickly, the two
set out to help large customers, such as cities and
major apartment complexes, create fast, reliable
wireless networks that cost less, conserve energy
and reduce e-waste, the vast amount of electronic
equipment left to rot in landfills. Based in
Arlington and Boston, Anaptyx builds 'mesh' networks
that can replace expensive individual Internet
connections."
"Entrepreneurship also has been a boon for
23-year-old Amanda Nachman, who 'jumped for joy'
when she found out that investors were interested in
supporting her dream to start
College Magazine.
Like Marshall, she developed an interest in starting
the magazine while enrolled in an entrepreneurship
class, only Nachman was at the University of
Maryland, College Park.
After graduation, Nachman went on to take on a
full-time, 9-to-5 position with a large consulting
firm for nine months, working on her magazine from 6
p.m. to 3 a.m. She finally began full-time work on
the magazine after making a pitch to a private
investor. Since, the quarterly publication has grown
from a distribution of 5,000 and presence on one
college campus to its current 30,000 copies in
circulation on eight area campuses. The magazine
also can be found online, and readers have the
option to receive a regular e-newsletter.
'I work on something different every day,' Nachman
explained. 'I create goals for myself and challenge
myself to meet them.'
Nachman works from her apartment and said that
coffee shops and the local library serve as
accommodating spaces when she meets with the
production staff of college students that includes
up to 30 writers, 13-20 contributing photographers
and five editors. With the design team based out of
San Diego and the print issues published in Florida,
she said that much of the work can be done online."
The Dingman Center’s Capital Access
Network (CAN) is screening regional early-stage
companies and coaching entrepreneurs in an effort to
successfully connect them with the angel investor
community. The CAN Program, sponsored by Morrison &
Foerster and Silicon Valley Bank, brought the
following great start-up companies to the March
Investor Breakfast:
CommuniClique:
CommuniClique offers software as a service
online collaboration technology which helps
companies talk, meet, and share. Features
include: conference bridge that actively calls
participants instead of them calling in,
recording and storage of every phone call,
ability to schedule phone calls to start
automatically, ability to share documents with
the entire team in real time.
uBee: uBee will
connect consumers with eager retailers that will
bid dynamically for product sales in a reverse
auction model. Consumers benefit from optimum
pricing on desired products purchased
efficiently from a buyer-centric site, and
retailers gain one-to-one access to customers at
the critical point of sale. The Company will
earn revenue through its Cost-Per-Action model,
where commissions are received on completed
purchase transactions.
Renewable Energy Solutions:
Renewable Energy Solutions is an early stage
start-up with proprietary energy production
technologies developed to the prototype level,
served by a team with expertise in renewable
energy and business. The company’s strategies
will leverage commercial and government ‘green’
initiatives to develop new markets for its
unique vertical axis, solar enhanced turbine
system, at a time when demand for clean energy
is rising rapidly.
The next CAN Breakfast will be held on Wednesday,
April 8, 2009.
Founded by Rudy Lamone in 1986, the Dingman Center
was one of the first of its kind in the country and
has emerged as a top-ranked entrepreneurship center.
Thanks to initial funding with a generous grant from
Michael D. Dingman, founder of the Signal Corporation
(now part of Honeywell International), the Dingman Center
continues to grow as a regional and national catalyst
in the field of entrepreneurship. The Center is now
aggressively evolving, and in some areas, is expanding
its services to further its role as a leader in the
student, regional, and academic entrepreneurial communities.
The Dingman Center is currently led by:
Asher Epstein, Managing Director Mr. John LaPides, Chairman of the Board and Entrepreneur-in-Residence
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Congratulations
to K
"ONE
SUMMER DAY IN 2007, two 20-something computer geeks
set out to test a new brand of wireless Internet
router in an apartment building in Brookline, Mass. 
