Rose-Hulman president: Entrepreneurship program key to Innovation Grove mission
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The newly established Noblitt Entrepreneurship Program at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology is expected to play a big part in the programming at the $102 million Innovation Grove district near the Terre Haute campus.
The program was announced Monday as a result of a $10 million gift from alumnus Niles Noblitt and his wife, Nancy.
Rose-Hulman President Robert Coons says the goal of the program is to create an overarching set of resources to support undergraduate students interested in entrepreneurship in all its forms.
“We have more and more undergraduate students that really are, when they arrive, saying they have interest in entrepreneurism, and that takes many forms,” Coons told Inside INdiana Business. “It may be a traditional entrepreneur that has interest in starting his or her own business at some point. It could also be many of our companies that hire our graduates—many of them like hiring graduates who think like an entrepreneur from a creativity standpoint.”
The idea for Innovation Grove was first outlined in October 2023, when Rose-Hulman received a $2.2 million grant from the federal Economic Development Administration to relocate its Rose-Hulman Ventures program closer to campus.
Rose-Hulman Ventures is an engineering consulting and product design firm that employs full-time project engineers as well as student interns. The firm works with companies on engineering projects that focus on a variety of products such as small devices, computer software and others.
Coons said the Noblitt Entrepreneurship Program will expand upon the concepts of Rose-Hulman Ventures.
“What this does is expands the opportunity to think about business creation and how that relates to some of the technological challenges that Rose Ventures faces,” he said. “So we see some opportunities to expand some of the work we’re doing at Ventures in the entrepreneurial realm and give students that opportunity as well.”
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He said the program will also help grow the school’s Sawmill Society Ventureship initiative, in which students live on campus during the summer months and use the institute’s resources to launch startup projects.
Adding the Noblitt Entrepreneurship Program, Coons said, will give those Ventureship students more instructional resources related to starting a business and also attract the eye of industry partners.
“We think there are a number of industries that have interest in students that are really focused on entrepreneurial startups that will really be intrigued by this,” he said.
While specific details of the new entrepreneurship program are being worked out, Coons said he hopes to add an entrepreneur-in-residence that will work out of Innovation Grove. He also wants to bring in speakers from around the world to talk with students about entrepreneurial issues and best practices.
“We think that this support will allow us to provide more mentoring to students that do have these interests than we can currently provide beyond the traditional classroom,” he said. “And we also think that these resources will allow us to expand our reach in terms of partnering with industry.”
Coons said having a growing entrepreneurship landscape on campus has become more and more important as the long-term outlook for students has changed over the years.
“If you ask them 20 years ago, they’d say, ‘What is my first job going to be? How much will my salary be? Where will I work?'” he said. “Those are still all really important questions. But more and more, what students are asking is, ‘How can I use my STEM education to make a difference in the world. Given using my education, how can I have an impact in the world?’ More and more students see entrepreneurism, in a variety of forms, as one of the ways in which they might have a larger opportunity to have impact on the world the way they’re defining it.”
The gift from the Noblitts, Coons said, will allow the institute to step up its game when it comes to entrepreneurship throughout the entire curriculum, which fits into the goals of Innovation Grove.
The Innovation Grove district is slated to open in 2026. In addition to the Rose-Hulman Ventures space, the district will include an outpatient surgery center being operated through a partnership between Terre Haute-based Union Health and the Indiana Joint Replacement Institute.