Vision quest: Innovative entrepreneurial initiative eyes takeoff

To learn more about the Urban Vision Initiative, visit utc.edu/uvi.

Mike Bradshaw is relishing the role of playing matchmaker.

Bradshaw is the first entrepreneur-in-residence in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, housed within the Gary W. Rollins College of Business.

Over the past year, he has laid the groundwork for an entrepreneurship program to alleviate poverty and increase wealth-building among the economically and socially underrepresented within Chattanooga’s urban core.

The philosophy behind the program, called Urban Vision Initiative, is that “anyone can be an entrepreneur and that entrepreneurship can be a pathway out of poverty,” Bradshaw said.

Approximately 18% of Chattanoogans live in poverty, and many have started their own businesses. UVI will provide these entrepreneurs with instruction and mentoring to help them grow their businesses and achieve profitability as quickly as possible.

As program facilitator, Bradshaw will match entrepreneurs with the program, introduce and pair UTC student consultants with these entrepreneurs, blend in community mentors and incorporate the knowledge and expertise of University faculty and staff.

With a mission of fostering and creating 100 sustainable new ventures over the next five years, UVI—made possible by the support of the Frost Family Foundation—is ready to launch.

“Our first cohort is ready to start in the fall and it’s all very exciting,” Bradshaw said. “This is an opportunity to connect students with the startup community and with life in the real world. It’s humbling to think about how much responsibility that is and to see how students will step up to that.

“This is an opportunity to really get your hands in some venture that can change people’s lives.”

Matching prospective community entrepreneurs

UVI is part of the Urban Poverty and Business Initiative, a national program developed by Michael H. Morris—a professor of entrepreneurship and social innovation at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.

Bradshaw said UVI is collaborating with numerous local partners, most notably LAUNCH Chattanooga, Tech Goes Home, The Company Lab, La Paz, Pathway Lending, Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union and the City of Chattanooga. The program will operate on a 10-month recurring schedule.

A big first step was the partnership with LAUNCH Chattanooga, an accelerator program that takes entrepreneurs in low-income communities from idea to launch.

“We’ll select 12 entrepreneurs from their graduates and put them into our 10-month program—starting with the six-week boot camp,” he said.

The boot camp will meet on six consecutive Saturday mornings beginning after Labor Day.

“We’ll be setting goals: Where do you want to be a year from now? What’s this program going to do for you as an entrepreneur?” Bradshaw explained. “At the same time, I’ll be learning a lot about the entrepreneurs. You can look at an application, but you don’t really know much.

“It’s interesting that most of the assistance an entrepreneur needs begins with questions in these entrepreneurs’ minds like, ‘How do I get to sleep at night when I’ve got all this pressure on me?’ These entrepreneurs are using entrepreneurship to put food on their table.”

Bradshaw said LAUNCH Chattanooga has also identified local entrepreneurial success stories to use as role models—both informationally and inspirationally—as part of the program.

“They’re partnering with us because they’ve got the street knowledge,” he said.

Matching UTC students to the entrepreneurs

A practicum course has been created in which students can enroll to enter an internship program complete with instruction on entrepreneurship. Bradshaw will be working with 12 student consultants for the first cohort in the fall.

“The students that we get here have to have a strong social conscience and want to help folks,” he said. “I’ll be looking for students willing to work with people practicing entrepreneurship in the most under-resourced and rawest circumstances.”

The students will go through classroom training of their own before being matched up with the entrepreneurs.

“We don’t know how that will go yet, so that’s exciting,” Bradshaw said. “You may place a student consultant with an entrepreneur and they go, ‘Man, this person is really able to bring some benefits to us and I’d like to continue to work with this person.’

“But I expect it’s going to be a combination, where a student who—as an example, is proficient in web development—can go from this entrepreneur to this entrepreneur to that entrepreneur and sort of spreads their efforts out.”

Bradshaw has a laundry list of items he’s looking for in the student consultant candidates, citing soft skills.

“It’s attitude. It’s empathy. It’s adaptability. It’s an understanding that could be from shared experience or from just a natural aptitude to put yourself in somebody’s seat and look at the struggle they’re going through or the successes they’re having,” he said.

“The benefit to the interns is extraordinary. It’s still true that paid internships are the strongest predictor of postgraduate hiring success. That’s the biggest thing that attracts me to this program besides the opportunity to help in the community.”

Identifying UTC faculty and staff

While much of the assistance an entrepreneur needs in the early stages is business functional, such as setting up an accounting system and getting a website running, Bradshaw said a key to the program’s long-term success is the role of the University.

To that end, he is leaning on the knowledge and skills of UTC faculty and staff to serve as mentors for the students and entrepreneurs.

“These heroes, if you will, from the University would come in and be very engaged with the entrepreneurial community,” Bradshaw said. “Unlike a lot of areas in the University’s activities in town, there isn’t a systematic program that creates the opportunity for those connections with people from the campus and people downtown.

“This program creates years of visibility and a time to create a systematic means of engagement with a real difficult social problem that a lot of people want to solve. Hopefully, we can enlist people from across the campus.”

This call to action enlisting faculty and staff as mentors is very significant, he said.

“Having the University enter this space to connect with us, stay with the program and be available for consultations as needed will be one of its greatest strengths,” Bradshaw said.

“This will be an avenue for what I believe is the first time in the entrepreneurial community where UTC is systematically engaging with them with a long-term commitment.”