Colby College in Waterville announced last week that it will establish the Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship to provide students with unique opportunities to better understand and apply the principles of entrepreneurship.
The new lab is the result of a unspecified gift from Trustee Emeritus Todd Halloran, a 1984 Colby graduate and Harvard Business School graduate who has spent the majority of his career investing in and working with accomplished business leaders and entrepreneurs, and their growing companies.
Launching next year, the Halloran Lab for Entrepreneurship will provide entrepreneurship education and training programs, funding for students to start commercial and social enterprises and initiatives, mentorship through a dedicated entrepreneurship network, as well as innovation and maker spaces on campus and in downtown Waterville. The lab will also help establish an internal entrepreneurship ecosystem involving alumni, faculty, staff, and Colby community members as well as partnerships with companies, organizations, and institutions that can further its mission.
“Direct engagement with solutions-based work, whether to create commercial enterprises or further societal progress, is the perfect complement to a rigorous liberal arts education,” Colby President David A. Greene said in a statement. “The work itself, from ideation and solutions development to business establishment and financing, takes deep learning and research, nimbleness and adaptability, strong communication and collaboration skills, comfort with failure, and resilience and persistence. These are traits that will serve our students well throughout their lives and will allow them to have an outsized impact on the world.”
Halloran hopes the lab will help highlight the many virtues of entrepreneurism. “It’s not just about creating a job for yourself,” he said. “It’s about having a positive impact on the economy and society by helping others, including through job creation and community building. There’s also tremendous value in the entrepreneurial process and the development of small businesses with the self-esteem it fosters, the teamwork it inspires, and the skills that it develops.”
The college will immediately begin a national search for an inaugural director of the entrepreneurship lab. An advisory board, which will be chaired initially by Halloran and include leaders from different sectors of the innovation economy, is currently being formed to ensure the lab is on the leading edge of business development and social change, that students working in the lab have access to outstanding mentors, opportunities at startups and innovative organizations, and venture funding for the most promising initiatives.
