At the Herb Kelleher Entrepreneurship Center, our dedicated focus is on fostering the growth of entrepreneurial skills and empowering Longhorns to embrace this mindset in their careers, whether through starting their own businesses or driving innovation within established industries. UT founders can tap into the HKEC’s wealth of entrepreneurial resources through our networking and funding opportunities, interactive speaker events, one-on-one mentorship, pitch competitions, and our semester-long practicum, the Forty Acres Founders Program.

Home to Texas is a summer internship and workforce development program that facilitates UT undergraduates with well-paid internships and sociology research experiences designed to help them understand the underlying values of their home communities. The IC² Institute has partnered with UT Austin School of Undergraduate Studies and Texas Career Engagement for the program, matching early undergraduate students from all majors with employers in their hometowns as interns/researchers.

The Innovation, Creativity & Entrepreneurship Certificate helps students develop skills to bring creative thinking and an entrepreneurial mindset to their goals, whether they’re interested in turning their ideas into a new venture, being part of a startup team, or bringing new ideas to established organizations. Through interdisciplinary coursework and research or internships, students gain skills including idea generation, design/prototyping, problem-solving, pitching ideas, and collaboration.

The Center for Integrated Design offers approximately 30 design-based courses each year. We offer the most cutting-edge innovation and creative practices that companies are demanding. Our courses are open for any enrolled student at UT Austin, and provide a range of offerings from Introduction to Design Thinking, skills like sketching and storytelling, and advanced coursework in partnership with Austin Design companies. Specific courses can be found on our website.

The Inventors Program (IP) engages undergraduates in applied experiences where they generate solutions to interesting questions. IP is inclusive to students who may not typically identify as entrepreneurs or innovators. Student teams are scaffolded through tiered experiences where they explore problem-scoping and ideation and develop industry and scientific skills with prototyping and project pitches. An IP industry network prepares students for internships and future careers in STEM industries.

The LaunchPad at UT Austin is a resource hub that helps all undergraduate and graduate students explore entrepreneurship at UT. We help students identify where they are in their entrepreneurial journey – Explore, Ideate, Create, or Scale – then educate and connect them to resources across campus and in Austin. LaunchPad resources include events, coworking space, funding, bootcamps, accelerators, and other programs. We are a proud member of the global Blackstone LaunchPad Network of 46+ campuses.

These fellowships support provide seed funding and completion grants to College of Liberal Arts faculty and faculty teams in economics, government, history, international relations, and global studies (Littlefield) and other departments (Ransom) with a public engagement commitment. They are open to eligible faculty with commercialization or entrepreneurial goals.

March Economic Madness is an interscholastic competition, building on our internal student challenge, that provides university students an opportunity to form teams and compete across universities to develop fitted and beneficial solutions for real community problems. A two-tiered selection process is used, first at each university, then between universities for top teams. Presentations will be delivered online with no need for travel. Cash awards are provided to top teams.

The McCombs Entrepreneur Summer Fellowship (MESF), funded by the generous support of alumni donors and the Harkey Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, enables innovative students to continue building their startups during the summer. Full-time undergraduate students from majors both in and outside of McCombs, and with four semesters of course work who are actively working on a startup are eligible to apply. Applicants working on any stage of startup development from ideation to scaling are eligible to apply.

One of the fastest growing minors in the Moody College of Communication, the Media and Entertainment Industries minor encourages students to critically assess and analyze the media and technology sectors from industrial and entrepreneurial perspectives. Our students are trained to think like entrepreneurs—to learn from the innovative thinking of historical media magnates and digital content creators alike—as well as apply those skills in a variety of experiential learning courses and assignments.