The Red Frame Lab, Denison’s hub for entrepreneurship and design thinking, has received an anonymous gift of $100,000 to elevate student start-up programs. The gift also will support the college’s rapidly expanding ReMix Entrepreneurship Summit, which is heading to Chicago on May 18, in a condensed format known as “ReMix on the Road.”
“This gift enables our students and alums to have even more phenomenal entrepreneurship opportunities,” says Steve Krak, director of the Red Frame Lab.
“We are proud of the fact that students from every major are taking advantage of our programs in design thinking, consulting, and entrepreneurship, led by business leaders and innovators,” says Rick Coplin, associate director of the Red Frame Lab. “This is heartening confirmation of the value of what we’ve built over the past five years, and of what we are looking to do in the future. We are very grateful.”
The gift will support Red Frame Lab’s progress toward several goals:
- Support prototyping and startup funds: A projected 20 teams per year participate in the Red StartUp and/or Red Accelerate programs through the Red Frame Lab. Startup funds can help support initial business costs for student teams, including prototypes, establishing LLCs, research expenses, insurance, license and permit fees, equipment and supplies, advertising, and promotion.
- Administration/operations funds: Funds for stipends to curated Mentors-in-Residence who lend their time, real-world expertise, and entrepreneurial practices to students,. These funds could also provide additional experts in the Red Founders Circle, which consists of experts in the fields of legal, accounting, marketing, design, photography, and more.
- Awards funding: The Red StartUp and Red Accelerate Pitch Competition result in cash prizes for winners. Team winners can choose to receive the funds as a grant disbursed in one lump sum to the business, as a series of milestone grants, or they can opt to take the reward as personal income.
- Discretionary funds: These funds will help students and startups outside of regular programming.
- ReMix Entrepreneurship Summit: These funds will support the ReMix summits that bring entrepreneurship-oriented Denison alumni and students together to share successes, prototypes, and ideas, as they network and learn from one another.
More about Red Frame Lab:
Launched in 2017, the Red Frame Lab builds on the strength of Denison’s innovative liberal arts education. Students level up their learning and prepare for lives of success and consequence as they amass entrepreneurial and design thinking skills through one-on-one coaching with experts, innovative and adaptive programs, and compelling projects with real-world clients. Red Frame Lab students build portfolio-expanding experiences, network with alumni and industry leaders, and claim a definitive advantage as they launch into careers and post-graduate education.
More about ReMix on the Road in Chicago on May 18, 2023:
ReMix on the Road pulls some of the most extraordinary experiences from the three-day ReMix Entrepreneurship Summit into a six-hour event for alums and students. Connect with fellow visionary alums and students through interactive, high-quality workshops to build skills and re-fuel passions.