Bringing Students to Startups

As Entrepreneurial Fellows, students help assess early-stage technologies for commercial potential, discuss concepts that drive design thinking, apply customer discovery methods, develop business and financial models, engage in the daily operations of a startup, shadow the Mentors-in-Residence in mentoring activities, and serve as TLA ambassadors on campus and in the community to promote commercialization activities.


Meet each of our Entrepreneurial Fellows: Ike Chinyere is a M.D.-Ph.D. candidate at the UArizona College of Medicine-Tucson, Steven Fernandez, pursuing an MBA at the Eller College of Management,Scott Golgowski, pursuing an MBA at the Eller College of Management, Ryan Ott, pursuing a double major in MIS and Operations and Supply Chain Management at the Eller College of Management.

Read about the program's launch

Graduate Student Develops System to Address $150B Healthcare Losses Due to No-Shows

Vinodh Subramanian, who graduated in May 2019 with a master’s degree in Systems and Industrial Engineering, studied the many factors that make us keep and attend – or forego – visits to our healthcare providers. With help from his advisor Robert Lapore, he developed a deep understanding of the problem and a solution to reduce appointment no-shows in medical practices using systems thinking principles. We worked with him to develop the idea and launch a new company, Hipokratiz, LLC.

“TLA is like a moving train. You have to catch it and then it takes you places you couldn’t have seen or imagined.”
– Vinodh Subramanian

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Funding Student Innovation

This year we launched our first Student Innovation Challenge whereby TLA provided funds to student teams to develop impactful inventions. We received 18 proposals and funded five projects. Those selected include a hub-and-spoke mushroom cultivation system, a solution for online small claims arbitration, an anti-obesity dog food, a real-time road health app, and a non-clogging toilet paper. We will be holding subsequent challenges in FY2021.

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