CIE Executive Director Jay Jayamohan and HU President Eric Darr, joined by Harrisburg area officials, led the ribbon cutting for the new center today in Strawberry Square.
In Harrisburg, great ideas have a new place to take root.
On Wednesday, the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, an affiliate of Harrisburg University, officially opened on the first floor of Strawberry Square in downtown Harrisburg.
“Everybody who was lucky enough to be born in this country should be starting a company–or at least doing a side hustle,” CIE Executive Director Jay Jayamohan told a large group of supporters and officials before the ribbon-cutting. “So, CIE is here for all of those people.”
The center is home to 11 startup founders enrolled in its business incubator program, with most of the enterprises minority- and women-owned. The new space offers founders—the entrepreneurs who are invited into the incubator—residency to develop their business ideas for up to 18 months, financial assistance, coaching and student interns, according to HU.
“Economic development and support for businesses have always been part of HU’s mission,” said Dr. Eric Darr, HU president. “The center is accessible and for anyone who has an idea. It can be anybody who just has a concept but doesn’t know where to start. We hope, by having founders come to the Entrepreneurship Center, it creates new companies and jobs throughout the Harrisburg region and beyond.”
Jayamohan and a network of entrepreneurs and innovators mentor the incubator’s founders in the center. They help them form corporations and connect them with funding resources, find pro-bono attorneys for their intellectual property, help them flesh out ideas, provide support staff, and connect them with technology and software development partners.
“The multi-faceted goal of CIE is not only flipping the script on what you must ‘look like’ to be an innovator, but to build a replicable model to create a positive economic change in small cities and towns,” Jayamohan said. “This will not happen without the support of the larger community and so we are excited for our new space and have entrepreneurs and innovators from the community continue to be an evangelist for the work we do.”
To learn more about the CIE and the Entrepreneurship Center, please visit https://cie.harrisburgu.edu/. Click here to read our recent feature story about the center.
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