A letter from the Director.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a long and successful track record of producing revolutionary inventions and innovations: sound on film, ILLIAC mainframe computers, the MRI, the theory of superconductivity, the transistor, synthetic-YouTube among countless others.

The creation of these life-changing innovations is in the University’s DNA—which has educated and supported many of today’s luminary entrepreneurs and business leaders. Origin Ventures Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership, a unit of Gies College of Business, contributes substantially to our campus’s capacity to inspire, train, and support student entrepreneurs looking to create products, programs, firms, and nonprofits that address the 21st century’s greatest challenges.

The Academy provides critical growth capital to student ventures in the iVenture Accelerator, a cross-college multi-disciplinary initiative to support the best student startups bringing commercial, cultural, and social value from across campus. Each student fellow is financially backed through generous support from our donors and supported by our partners and strong network to find product-market fit, build prototypes, pilot programs, build key partnerships, and scale.

We offer the most generous student support of any university entrepreneurial program we know of, and it shows in the diverse success of our student entrepreneurs. With this set of financial backing, world-class mentorship, and access to state-of-the-art resources, our students make immense progress not just on the challenges that they are tackling, but with their own educational growth and learning through experience and action.

The University of Illinois has a rich history and culture of entrepreneurship and our innovative ideas have had global impact. Here at iVenture, we are channeling this strong tradition and building upon that legacy by fostering the dreamers and doers of today to build the future.