Each year, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship hosts the Pitch Dingman Competition — the University of Maryland’s business competition. Hundreds of students, faculty, alumni and VIPs will gather to watch top student entrepreneurs pitch their businesses to an expert panel of judges to compete for a total of $30,000 in seed funding.

When you’re looking to start a business, it helps to gain some advice from someone who’s done it before. And that may be doubly true for founders of color. Although 12.7% of the U.S. population is black, only 4.3% of business owners are. That’s why on Feb. 26, 2020, students gathered in Van Munching Hall for Being Black in Entrepreneurship: Fireside Chat, an opportunity for young emerging business owners to learn about starting a business as a founder of color.

On December 6, 2019, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship hosted its second annual edition of Hult@UMD as part of the global student social entrepreneurship case competition. The Hult Prize asks participants to explore ideas that answer a specific social challenge. This year’s challenge was to build a startup that has a positive impact on our planet with every dollar earned.

On November 22, 2019 in Van Munching Hall’s Tyser Auditorium, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at Maryland Smith hosted the semifinal round of Pitch Dingman Competition, featuring 10 undergraduate, graduate and PhD student-run businesses across University of Maryland, College Park. Each team who advanced to the semifinals was vetted through a quarterfinals round by a judges panel of alumni entrepreneurs and participated in mandatory workshops and advising sessions.

Student Startups Offer Goods and Services, Hone Entrepreneurial Skills at Terp Marketplace If the college campus is the embodiment of democracy’s marketplace of ideas, Terp Marketplace might be the smaller-scale equivalent for University of Maryland entrepreneurialism.

College Park, Md. - November 13, 2019 - The University of Maryland is once again recognized as an educational leader in entrepreneurship, according to the “Top 50 Best Undergrad Programs for Entrepreneurs in 2020” rankings published by The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine.

Starting a company is a hard but fulfilling journey, Julia Brown ’13 told female undergraduates at the fourth annual Ladies First Fall Dinner. The dinner discussion, hosted by the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, aimed to create an encouraging space for nonbinary and female students to brainstorm, share and discuss starting their own companies.

This week, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at Maryland Smith will launch the pilot of the Terp Startup Fellows, an exciting addition to the Center’s venture programming portfolio that supports entrepreneurs of all kinds at University of Maryland. The Terp Startup Fellows is a continuation of the Center’s Terp Startup summer Accelerator, which provides a competitive stipend up to $5,000, co-working space and curriculum to 10 - 15 teams who spend eight weeks working to make progress on their businesses.

Food production will move in two directions to keep pace with consumer demand in the 21st century, Honest Tea co-founder Seth Goldman told faculty, staff and students on Oct. 30, 2019, at the University of Maryland.

University of Maryland students sparked ideas for nonbinary clothing, home-cooked food delivery and more on Sept. 28, 2019, at the annual spark: Where Fearless Ideas Start. Co-hosted by the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship and Startup Shell, a student-run incubator, the ideation workshop fostered experimentation and an entrepreneurial mindset.