RIT’s College of Business Awarded NCIIA Grant

The College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology has secured the university’s first grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). The $15,000 award will help establish a new digital entrepreneurship program consisting of three sequenced courses: Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship and Digital Industry, and Applied Venture Creation.

“The objective of the new program is to train a new generation of business savvy and entrepreneurial-creative professionals in emerging digital markets,” says Richard DeMartino, assistant professor of management and international business in RIT’s College of Business, who is leading the RIT project.

“The program’s approach fosters collaboration by multi-disciplinary groups and experiential learning—and also integrates RIT’s alumni entrepreneurs, team-teaching and RIT’s new student incubator,” DeMartino explains. “One of the courses, Entrepreneurship in the Digital World, will be offered by the College of Business but also is cross listed in two other RIT colleges: B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Systems and College of Imaging Arts and Sciences.”

According to DeMartino, one of the pre-existing courses, Entrepreneurship, has been highly popular among students and has tripled in size the past three years.

“RIT is a world leader in digital fields and the NCIIA grant will allow student entrepreneurs to continue forward by developing a digital product or service, then explore commercialization and venture creation options,” DeMartino says. “Who knows what advances they can make in fields like computer gaming, bioinformatics, new media, graphic arts, photography, software engineering, information technology, computer science, and imaging. The possibilities are endless.”