College Park - February 14, 2005 The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland announced today that it has invested $10,000 in start-up funding to Hook & Ladder Brewery, a student-run business founded by second-year Smith MBA student Matthew Fleischer. The investment is part of the seed stage funding the center makes available to student-run, start-up companies.

If entrepreneurialism has a motto it should be I think I can. Entrepreneurs are no more likely to want to stick their necks out than wage earners, they just have an unusual amount of self-confidence, according to results of a recent research paper, Entrepreneurial Risk and Market Entry. Study findings debunk a common stereotype about entrepreneurs namely that they are inherently more comfortable with risk.

Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor dark of night could stop the ten teams contending for first place in the re-scheduled Part-Time MBA Business Innovation Competition on Friday, January 28. Each team had just eight minutes to convince an astute panel of judges that they had the most innovative idea, and a comprehensive business plan that could bring it from the realm of ideas to reality. All 332 second-year part-time MBA students participated in the competition.

According to the United Small Business Administration Web site, women business owners are critically important to the American economy. America's 9.1 million women-owned businesses employ 27.5 million people and contribute $3.6 trillion to the economy. It was with this in mind that the Graduate Women In Business (GWIB) in conjunction with the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship hosted a panel of women entrepreneurs on September 22, 2004 in an event entitled Hot Mommas: The New Rules for Having It All

Nearly 20 years after the launch of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, a new strategy launches to foster the entrepreneurial spirit in the Smith community. Pitch Dingman builds on the Dingman business development process of Ideation, Assessment, Implementation, and Iteration by creating a regular forum where aspiring entrepreneurs can pitch their business ideas to a panel of experienced scholars.

Entrepreneur magazine places the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, as the #1 business school for entrepreneurship in rankings based on a survey of alumni. The rankings are part of Entrepreneur's 2nd Annual Top 100 Entrepreneurial Colleges and Universities issue, which also places Smith among its distinguished group of 13 schools ranked in the top tier of national Comprehensive programs.

The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, has won the 2003 national Outstanding Entrepreneurship Course of the Year award from the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) for its groundbreaking course in which MBA students work with the $20-million New Markets Growth Fund (NMGF). The course, New Markets Growth Fund Practicum, was unanimously selected as the winner at the 18th Annual USASBE Annual Conference in Dallas on Jan. 18, 2004.

A team of five talented Smith School MBA students won second place at the fourth annual Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC ). The competition was held at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (March 29-31, 2001).

Max Major '05 can read your mind. It's a passion he parlayed into the only career he ever really considered. While at Maryland Smith, he honed his entrepreneurial skills to build a business as a renowned mentalist. Major, who describes his craft as combining "the showmanship of a magician mixed with some cool psychology and hypnosis," now performs at more than 200 events each year for top organizations like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Department of Defense.

In the early automobile industry, what separated the greats, like Henry Ford, was quite a bit of luck,