Establishing the STEM Students Entrepreneurs Club to Facilitate Mentoring and Assistance to Start-up Businesses Based on Innovations in STEM

Brief Description

The aim is to create a hub for informal extracurricular activities – developing and enhancing entrepreneurial skills of STEM students by acquiring tacit knowledge. Those skills and knowledge can help the students to become job creators rather than job takers after graduation. Inspiring talks by successful entrepreneurs, business people, and graduates who've created businesses are held monthly under the STEMpreneurs initiative.

Other activities include supporting, encouraging, and mentoring students to take their ideas from rapid prototyping, product development, and production/deployment. Partnerships will be established with several organizations including AUT Students Association, Faculty of Business, AUT Enterprises, Auckland Chamber of Commerce and others. Evaluation of students' benefits and successes from participating in the Club's activities will be conducted through a rigorous longitudinal study.

Team members

  1. A/Prof. Sergiy Klymchuk (project co-leader)
  2. Brody Radford (project co-leader)

Funding

Support is being sought from AUT and Ako Aotearoa National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence.

Contact

Project co-leader – Associate Professor Sergiy Klymchuk sergiy.klymchuk@aut.ac.nz

Project co-leader – Brody Radford brody.radford@aut.ac.nz