March 1, 2015

The theme of this month's ExCITeCast is Entrepreneurship. This is, of course, a key area of focus at the ExCITe Center, where we work at the intersection of Technology, Design, and Entrepreneurship.

To us, Entrepreneurship is broader than the common definition... that starting a  company, maximizing return for your investors, and having some sort of exit strategy to make lots of money. (If that's your pursuit, that's great, and more power to you.)

We believe Entrepreneurship is more general than that... Simply put, It's starting something new to make a change for the better. This means empowering individuals and small groups to effect change. It involves taking responsibility to improve a situation. And it requires the curiosity to question why something is the way it is, and the understanding that to do something new, you have to know what's been done before.

I tell those new to  Drexel University that it is an incredibly entrepreneurial place, in all senses of the term. You can really make unique things happen here, but *you* will be the one to do them. Creating any new enterprise requires considerable initiative and comes with substantial risk, but it's a both a great privilege and a responsibility.

I think our particular enterprise, the ExCITe Center, is an example of that. ExCITe is a startup. It's our great opportunity and privilege to try something new, to make things better. It's a different approach for academia, where we seek to create new knowledge by integrating understanding across a variety of disciplines. A part of that is advances in technology. Another part is the human-centered perspective provided by the arts. It's also products, services, and organizations that change people's lives for the better.

But overall, it's the idea that together we are greater than the sum of our parts, and that together we will invent the future of Drexel.

We hope you'll join us for this journey. There's plenty of room on this train, and we're just getting started.

Youngmoo Kim, Director