Student Entrepreneurial Experience
Indianapolis
The STARTedUP Foundation gives students a straightforward challenge: Find a problem, create a solution and build a business around it.
From that starting point, STARTedUP has helped more than 6,000 students tap into their creativity and ambition to explore entrepreneurial career paths.
STARTedUP CEO and co-founder Don Wettrick was a Noblesville High School teacher when, inspired initially by a Daniel Pink TED Talk, he first put that challenge to students in his classes. The effect was powerful: Encouraging the kids to think entrepreneurially was like lighting a fuse, even for students who previously had little interest in school.
“I’ve never met a group of people that disliked school more but loved learning more than entrepreneurs,” he says.
In 2018, Wettrick partnered with Hunter Stone, one of his former students, and launched STARTedUP to connect more students to the power of entrepreneurship to unlock opportunity through a variety of programs and activities.
The organization also equips teachers to make entrepreneurship a part of their classroom plans. The STARTedUP Innovation Accelerator, a three-level professional development path, helps teachers light the fuse Wettrick saw sparking in his classroom. It introduces teachers to strategies for bringing innovation into their lessons, connects them with resources and other teachers across the nation who are implementing STARTedUP approaches, and engages them in events with industry experts.
A key component of the STARTedUP program is its Innovation Accelerator, a pitch competition that invites students to develop and hone business plans and compete for start-up funds.
A number of students have turned STARTedUP pitches into businesses or built on their experiences to launch new ventures.
For example, Ethan Hilton and his innovation partner Tolen Schried both claimed titles with the STARTedUP Challenge (formerly Innovate WithIN) and now are at work on caseflood.ai, a lead-management tool for the legal profession that won them acceptance into the global start-up accelerator Y Combination.
Hilton credits the program with getting him engaged in high school.
Faith Spencer also found a purpose through her Innovation WithIN experience. When she and her team won a regional title and came in third in the statewide competition, she says she learned from the process of developing and pitching an idea (for taillights that alert cyclists to approaching traffic), but, more importantly, she recognized the life-changing power of entrepreneurialism. Now her life mission is making that power available to people who otherwise might not have access to it.
The result is IronWorkz Co., a nonprofit she founded to connect resources with the many people in her community who had built small businesses – aka, gigs and side hustles – but didn’t think of themselves as entrepreneurs or take a strategic approach to what they were doing.
“We have all these businesses in garages that aren’t formalized, doing things they shouldn’t be doing,” she says. “They’re going about it the wrong way.”
Spencer and her partners work to provide those operators with resources and networks that get them onto a better track and, ultimately, success.
In other words, she found a problem, devised a solution, and now she’s building a business around it – just the way STARTedUP taught her.
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