Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” At Georgia Tech, students and faculty and administrators are constantly looking beyond today and imagining what products and services the world will need in the future. They’re not only getting and providing an education, but also together dreaming up new innovations and building companies around these ideas—right here on campus.
It used to be that students would come to Tech so they could get the training they needed to land a prime job with a Fortune 500 company. But today, rather than work for somebody else’s corporation, many students are coming here to create their own jobs and their own companies. This shift is a trend that President G.P. “Bud” Peterson is distinctly proud of.
Today’s Yellow Jackets are actively involved in understanding and learning about entrepreneurship and how to commercialize their brilliant ideas, from building prototypes to drafting business plans. The InVenture Prize competition and the Senior Capstone Design course are just a couple examples of this. And, of course, entrepreneurship, innovation and startup incubation are at the core of what we do at Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute. The startup bug is catching hold across campus. Former student and tech entrepreneur Chris Klaus recently announced a $2 million gift and investment in our students through the CREATE-X initiative (see page 47) which is designed to build an even more robust curricula to teach future engineers, computer scientists and more how to capitalize on their innovative ideas.
Now, entrepreneurship is not new at Tech. John Imlay, IM 59, is considered by many to be the godfather of Atlanta’s startup community. John built one of the nation’s most successful software companies—Management Science America—which became an incubator for technology executives and startup companies in Atlanta. MSA is credited with training more than 300 CEOs and spawning nearly 100 companies.
Sadly, John passed away in March at age 78. In addition to his entrepreneurial skills, John was known for his generous spirit, and he served as a mentor to many alumni who wanted to follow in his footsteps.
In this issue, we’ll explore how Georgia Tech is building a strong culture of entrepreneurship, helping students and faculty take their innovations to market, attracting major corporations to participate and making a significant economic impact on the region by doing so. (In 2013, Georgia Tech’s economic impact was calculated at nearly $2.7 billion, almost twice the annual budget of the Institute.) We’ll also look at some of our most successful alumni who are blazing trails with their own companies.
We hope the wide variety of startup stories in this issue of the Alumni Magazine help you pick up on the energy that’s building around entrepreneurship at Tech.
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