UMD’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship partners with social enterprise accelerator 

Listen to this article

The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business announced Friday is partnering with the Halcyon Incubator in Washington in a social entrepreneurship program.

The partnership includes workshop offerings, expanded advising opportunities for Halcyon fellows and University of Maryland students and a nationwide research report. The partnership will bolster the region’s growing social venture ecosystem.

“Partnering with the Dingman Center represents another step forward to helping social entrepreneurs in this area and beyond successfully navigate their entrepreneurial journey,” said Ryan Ross, program director for the Halcyon Incubator.

Social entrepreneurship is a growing field on college campuses and in the broader entrepreneurship ecosystem. UMD courses on the topic frequently have waitlists each semester, and Halcyon Incubator sees hundreds of applications for the spots in its cohort of fellows. According to the Dingman Center’s Associate Director for Social Entrepreneurship, Sara Herald, this partnership is ” a unique opportunity to connect our students with some of the nation’s most promising social entrepreneurs.”

Dingman Center staff and advisers will lead workshops for, and provide feedback to, the cohorts of Halcyon Fellows, and fellows and staff will speak in classes and events at UMD.  Select Halcyon Fellows will also be invited to pitch their companies to the Dingman Center Angels when seeking seed-stage investments.

The hallmark of the partnership is a collaboration on the Social Enterprise Ecosystems Report.  This effort reaches beyond the Dingman Center with leadership from Smith School research faculty and students studying outside of the entrepreneurship track. Released for the first time in 2016 by Halcyon Incubator and Capital One, the 2017 report will be based on research led by Smith School Associate Professor David Kirsch and a team of Smithstudents from the Social Innovation Fellows program, which is supported by the Center for Social Value Creation.  The student team is comprised of juniors Fasika Delessa and Sarina Haryanto and seniors Aishwariya Chandrasekar and Evan Haas.

“The Social Enterprise Ecosystems Report seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of what founders really need to create impact,” Ross said. “Working with the incredible team at the Smith School will help us to deepen the research and analysis to better help these social entrepreneurs.”

The Dingman Center is one of the nation’s oldest academic entrepreneurship centers, with a mission to make entrepreneurs of all kinds more successful.  Halcyon Incubator is the leading social venture incubator in the Washington region after launching less than three years ago with a commitment to solving 21st century challenges throughout the nation and world.  Now supporting its sixth cohort, Halcyon Incubator is a program of the Georgetown-based S&R Foundation.