BY JOHN COX [email protected]
In the latest investment aimed at supporting local entrepreneurship, Cal State Bakersfield disclosed Thursday it has received a series of private pledges totaling more than $1 million for the launch of a new center to help prospective business owners create their own startups.
The university’s proposed Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation would enroll its first group of perhaps a dozen aspiring business founders as soon as next spring. Initial plans call for putting them through an intense, 10-week accelerator program; a longer-term office support system called a business incubator would likely be added in the years ahead.
CEI, as it’s being called, would build on a growing number of similar or related efforts around Kern aimed at addressing the county’s documented strengths in entrepreneurial spirit, alongside a success rate that lags the area’s peers around the country.
“With this center, and the application for a local CDFI (community development financial institution, like a local bank focused on specific priorities), which should come next year, we will have most of the ingredients needed to support young firms,” texted John Paul “J.P.” Lake, who along with his wife, Ingrid, have pledged $500,000 from their SeedCore Foundation to help get CEI through its first four to five years.
Locally based Skeet Varner Foundation offered the same amount under an identical arrangement in which half the donation would be put up in the near term, with the rest coming later. None of the money would go into an endowment but would be considered seed money to be spent in support of CEI.
Foundation Secretary Jacob Panero said he’s thrilled about the center, given the increasing difficulty of starting and sustaining a business. He added that small businesses “are how the engine of this economy really revs.”
Housed under the university’s School of Business and Public Administration, the center is expected to open applications to anyone in the area as opposed to serving only CSUB students, said the department’s interim dean, business management professor John Stark.
The plan is to appoint someone to run the center in the months ahead, Stark said, adding it could be a tenured professor, a lecturer or someone outside academia.
He added that the new center will fold in the activities of CSUB’s existing entrepreneurship program, headed up by Jeremy Woods, an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at the university who has worked closely with scores of aspiring entrepreneurs to launch startups.
Business accelerator programs had been missing entirely from the county until the need for them was pinpointed by Kern’s B3K Prosperity economic development collaboration. Since then, Bitwise Industries has unveiled plans to start one in downtown Bakersfield with financial support from local government. SeedCore has announced plans to open an accelerator in Kernville, to be followed by several more around the county.
“We have made considerable progress in just a few years building out our entrepreneurship ecosystem,” stated Lake, a leader of B3K’s efforts to promote greater entrepreneurship around the county. He invited other businesses to join the effort to contribute money in support of CEI’s establishment and expansion.
“We need to continue strengthening the collaboration amongst the various support systems and work to ensure that help reaches all parts of the community,” he texted.
Two other donations of $100,000 each have come in support of the new center from alumnus Chris Hayden and Jim Burke Ford Lincoln, which said by email its contribution carries on a legacy begun in the early 1970s by the late car dealership owner Jim Burke himself.
“Establishing this center is the perfect combination of our company’s long-term support of education, with encouraging the skills necessary to help our students and broader community compete in the 21st century,” the company stated. “As our local economy changes, we want to be at the front of encouraging the next great idea for long-term success.”
This article originally appeared in Bakersfield.com.
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