The university pipeline whole: Gigot, ESTEEM, Innovation Park, the IDEA Center

ITEM 5 · 2000s–2019 · BOUNDARY: UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

The second wave was manufactured, and the factory's course is dated: Notre Dame's entrepreneurship line ran first through a named center — the Gigot Center for Entrepreneurship in the Mendoza College of Business, the benefaction of Gary Gigot, the Microsoft and Visio alumnus who would later co-found Vennli (item 7) — and through the McCloskey business-plan competition, renamed the McCloskey New Venture Competition, the pipeline's annual sieve. In 2009 the university founded ESTEEM — Engineering, Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Excellence Master's — as its first multidisciplinary graduate program, a collaboration of the Colleges of Science and Engineering and the Mendoza College of Business. In early 2017 the university consolidated the whole line into the IDEA Center — Innovation, De-Risking and Enterprise Acceleration — folding in ESTEEM, the technology-transfer office (as its Commercialization Engine), the McCloskey competition and Innovation Park's staff, under Bryan Ritchie, the university's first vice president for innovation.

The output figures are the university's own and print at that strength: the IDEA Center launched 27 startup companies in its first year (July 2017–June 2018), against a previous single-year record of three and a total of 33 startups in the university's entire prior history; it launched 32 more in calendar 2019, bringing its cumulative total to 64 and the university's official startup count to 86, with the 64 active startups reporting 99 full-time jobs at an average salary of $72,000. The Granger filter the checklist requires is then applied plainly: of the firms this pipeline produced, the ones seated on this ground are carried in item 7, and they are few — the pipeline's graduates seated overwhelmingly in South Bend, at Innovation Park, Ignition Park and downtown. The pipeline is boundary here; its Granger yield is this section's own, and it is small enough to name entire.

Sources:

1. ESTEEM Graduate Program, "History of the Program" and "Entrepreneurship at Notre Dame" (esteem.nd.edu) — ESTEEM founded 2009; the IDEA Center's composition (ESTEEM, Commercialization Engine, McCloskey New Venture Competition, Innovation Park staff); Leighton Hall 55,000 sq ft, Quinn Hall late 2017, 40,000 sq ft.
2. IDEA Center / Notre Dame News, July 16, 2018 — 27 startups in the first year against 33 in the university's prior history and a previous record of three.
3. Office of the Provost, Notre Dame, January 16, 2020 — 32 startups launched in 2019; 64 since the IDEA Center's 2017 founding; 86 official Notre Dame startups; 99 full-time jobs at $72,000 average.
4. Notre Dame Magazine, "The Benevolent Executioners" — the IDEA Center established 2016/17 under Bryan Ritchie; the Innovation Park buildings.