From napkin sketch to startup: How the University of Minnesota powers entrepreneurs
No matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, the University of Minnesota has a pathway to help you succeed.
Talk to any entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that the road from an original idea to launching a successful startup is not a straight path. It’s a winding road full of successes, setbacks, and everything in between.
Entrepreneurship is challenging, but the University of Minnesota offers its community of researchers, students, alumni, and members of the community a wealth of resources that can help make the journey a little less daunting.
Empowering student entrepreneurs
For many, their entrepreneurial journey begins in the classroom. Several standout courses across the University provide students with foundational skills to shape their ideas.
In its Entrepreneurship in Action course, Minnesota Carlson offers students the reality of launching a startup company.
During fall semester, students develop, evaluate, and test potential business opportunities and develop a plan to launch their business. Launches happen during the optional spring semester, when students develop and sell initial products, test major assumptions, and create a plan for the ongoing business. Besides receiving support from faculty and experienced entrepreneurs, students interact with attorneys, bankers, and other professional service providers. Each business receives up to $15,000 in funding and operates out of dedicated space at the school.
Meanwhile, Minnesota Carlson’s STARTUP course allows students to develop their own personal business ideas by working with instructors and mentors from the business community to test their entrepreneurial ventures.
Entrepreneurship isn’t just for business students
Many colleges across the University of Minnesota offer specialized courses to get student ideas off the ground, from "Chemical and Materials Technology Commercialization" to “What do you need to start a biotech company?”
In the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, Teaching Professor of Entrepreneurship Jeffrey Stamp is transforming how students think about their futures—by teaching them to think like entrepreneurs. Students in Stamp's course, Innovating the Future: Applied Human and AI-Generated Creativity in Entrepreneurial Problem Solving, get hands-on immersion experience in innovation techniques that emphasize new ways of thinking and framing for everyday problems and grand challenges in both personal and professional lives.
A College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences alum himself (BS ’83, PhD ’90 Food Science), Stamp’s teaching style is hands-on, inclusive, and deeply supportive, fostering an environment where students of all learning styles can thrive, empowering them to turn ideas into action.
For Stamp, it’s about more than launching startups—it’s about preparing students to lead, innovate, and make a difference in any field. “Great minds don’t necessarily think alike,” Stamp says. “But they do think like entrepreneurs.”
Since launching the Entrepreneurial and Leadership Program in 2020, Stamp has guided more than 460 students from 39 majors across 10 colleges.
Alumni like Benjamin Gross (BS ’23, Applied Economics) credit Stamp’s courses, such as Value-Added Entrepreneurship and Food and Agricultural Sales, with shaping their career paths. “I cannot overstate the impact these classes have had on me,” says Gross, now the owner of Carbon Build & Design.
Igniting innovation through funding and collaboration
With a product and plan in hand, entrepreneurs need exposure—and money. Enter MN Cup. The MN Cup competition, a free program of the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship at Minnesota Carlson, supports the development of breakthrough business ideas across Minnesota. It’s the country’s largest statewide new-venture competition.
The MN Cup competition connects aspiring founders to seasoned business leaders, offering mentorship, pitch coaching, and exposure to a wide range of experts. And those who advance have a chance at significant seed funding.
Since its inception in 2005, MN Cup has given away $5.8 million in seed capital, taking no equity in exchange. Finalists have gone on to raise more than $1.1 billion in venture capital.
About 25 percent of participants in MN Cup are University of Minnesota alums, and the competition also has a student division. Momease Solutions, which won the 2024 competition, was developed by two University of Minnesota graduates who saw a need to create better breast pumps for new moms.
Momease Solutions co-founders Ashley Mooneyham and Jennie Lynch at the MN Cup Grand Finale
“It was such a gratifying experience [to win MN Cup],” says Ashley Mooneyham, one of the company’s founders. “We learned so much. To win the grand prize is a cherry on top. It was a good way to end our MN Cup running after a couple of years in the competition.”
Budding undergraduate entrepreneurs can also get in on the action through the Biz Pitch competition, a University-run competition where students have an opportunity to present a new business idea to a panel of entrepreneurs and investors. The presentation must be 90 seconds, similar to the TV show “Shark Tank.”
And once those items are in the marketplace, they can be sold through Minnesota Alumni Market, which offers a curated online platform to showcase products made by University of Minnesota alumni.
Startups based on University research
Helping innovations move from the lab or classroom to the marketplace is the role of Technology Commercialization, part of the University of Minnesota’s Research & Innovation Office.
Also known as technology transfer, this process helps inventors and entrepreneurs turn breakthroughs into startups. Since 2006 the Technology Commercialization office and its Venture Center have facilitated the creation of more than 285 startups. Nearly 70 percent of those businesses are still active today, with three-quarters located in Minnesota.
The Technology Commercialization office offers a number of pathways for entrepreneurs to tap into University of Minnesota research and innovations. In fact, a big part of its role is finding entrepreneurs who can partner with University of Minnesota innovators and the technology commercialization team to pull together a plan and start a new company.
One example is the Discovery Launchpad program, a no-cost, no-equity-required startup incubator for forming startup companies based on University of Minnesota innovations. Teams in this program work one on one with a small group of knowledgeable Technology Commercialization staff and professional consultants to bolster their planning and address specific issues, challenges, and gaps in their business plans.
Another example is Discovery Capital, an early-stage investment program that helps breakthrough ideas reach the marketplace. The program supports startups built around licensed University of Minnesota technologies by co-investing up to $500,000 per funding round.
A successful landing
No matter where you are on your entrepreneurial journey—from sketching an idea to scaling a startup—the University of Minnesota offers the tools, guidance, and community to help you move forward.
With the right support, the winding road of entrepreneurship can lead somewhere extraordinary.
Giving Link
Support University of Minnesota startups with a gift to the University's Discover, Advance, Impact Initiative Fund, providing early stage investment funding to support innovative research in successfully entering the market, ensuring groundbreaking ideas become impactful businesses.
