The writing’s on the walls — eVillage gives entrepreneurship a new home


evillage

Students, faculty and business leaders tour eVillage and check out its write-on walls during open house luau. Photo/Max Kosydar ’13


When sophomore business major Nicole Rosanwo first walked into Chapman University’s eVillage, a cutting-edge nesting home for entrepreneurial start-ups, she could see the writing on the wall – literally.

The interior walls of the newly-restored vintage house that is home to eVillage are coated in a type of write-on-wipe-off wall paint that encourages brainstorm scribbling, an ideal canvas for idea-churning entrepreneurs. Rosanwo, an undergraduate in the Entrepreneurs in Residence program, arrived to find that the business folks she had been assigned to shadow had been busy discussing and sketching out their thoughts on the idea walls.

“It’s inspiring to see them working on their own ideas. You could tell there was a lot of buzz. You really just want to be a part of it,” Rosanwo said last week, during a festive luau-themed open house to unveil the new South Glassell facility.

Although it functions within the Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics in the Argyros School of Business and Economics, eVillage is partnered with a business accelerator called
K5Launch
and TriTech, a small business development center. Applicants accepted into eVillage receive a variety of resources, from on site mentoring and 24/7 access to facilities and those walls coated in
IdeaPaint
, all of which is aimed at having them be pitch-ready within 12 weeks. At the end of that prep time, entrepreneurs go to a pitch meeting where they try to hook investors and secure funding.

Budding entrepreneurs from the community may apply for entry to eVillage, but the companion student programs are reserved for Chapman University students with an interest in entrepreneurial studies, projects or business start-up ideas of their own.

“My mission is to let Chapman be the place where entrepreneurs, innovators and students collaborate,” said Richard Sudek, Ph.D., assistant professor and director of the Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics and chairman emeritus, Tech Coast Angels.

To learn more about the entrepreneurial facility, visit the
eVillage website
.

Dawn Bonker

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