Episode 85: Mary Ryan on How Entrepreneurship Enables Student Success
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What role can entrepreneurship can play in student success? How can colleges and universities embed entrepreneurial skills into their culture and curriculum? What are the events and programs to run? How can the right spaces support these efforts? We dive into these questions with Mary Ryan the Vice Provost for Research and Enterprise at Imperial College London and here all about their Enterprise Lab and global entrepreneurship ecosystem.
In the modern landscape of higher education, the traditional metric of success—earning a degree and securing a stable job—is undergoing a radical transformation. Today’s students aren't just looking for a credential; they are looking for the agency to change the world. At the heart of this shift is the integration of entrepreneurial thinking into the very fabric of the university experience.
In a recent episode of the Connected College Podcast, Mary Ryan, Vice Provost for Research and Enterprise at Imperial College London, shared how one of the world’s leading STEM institutions is moving beyond "arm-waving" pitches toward evidence-based innovation that solves global challenges.
Beyond Grades: Reimagining Student Success through Agency
For Mary Ryan, success isn't just about how well a class performs on an assessment. It’s about a specific way of thinking. True student success is defined by giving individuals the freedom to imagine how the world can be different, the obligation to challenge the status quo, and the technical skills to actually do something about it.
At Imperial, this ethos is summed up in a simple founding mission: "To be useful." By fostering a culture where students are encouraged to test hypotheses rather than just memorize facts, universities can equip graduates with the resilience needed for a rapidly changing workforce.
The Enterprise Lab: Building a Sandbox for Innovation
One of the most striking aspects of the Imperial model is the Enterprise Lab. Unlike many career services that feel like an afterthought, the Lab is a centralized, sector-agnostic facility accessible to all students. Interestingly, it remains entirely extracurricular.
The rationale? Giving credit for entrepreneurship changes the motivation. By keeping it voluntary, the university captures a bottom-up desire for innovation. Currently, over a quarter of the student body engages with the lab, proving that higher education entrepreneurship doesn't need to be forced—it needs to be facilitated. Students aren't just launching startups; they are learning to collect evidence, pitch to investors, and build interdisciplinary teams.
Scaling Deep Tech and the Power of Productive Failure
The world is moving toward "Deep Tech"—innovation that requires significant scientific or engineering breakthroughs. This isn't just about building an app; it’s about solving climate change, improving healthcare, and advancing AI.
A critical component of this journey is shifting the cultural perception of failure. Mary notes that while the US culture (particularly at institutions like MIT) embraces the "fail fast" mentality, European institutions are still catching up. By facilitating "Venture Tracks" to the US and creating deep tech innovation hubs, universities can teach students that a failed hypothesis isn't a crushing blow—it’s a necessary data point on the path to a breakthrough.
The Class of 2030: Preparing for a Boundaryless Career
Looking toward the future, the "Class of 2030" will need a toolkit that includes AI literacy, sustainability, systems thinking, and entrepreneurial skills. The traditional linear career path is being replaced by a desire for more control and autonomy.
Institutions can support this by creating "both-and" opportunities: embedding basic entrepreneurial awareness into the core curriculum while maintaining high-intensity, extracurricular "sandboxes" for those ready to launch ventures. Programs like startup internships—where students are seconded into high-growth companies for the summer—provide the real-world friction necessary to turn academic knowledge into professional capability.
Conclusion: Start with Space and Passion
Mary Ryan’s advice for institutions looking to follow suit is simple: your students are already more ready for this than you think. To succeed, universities must provide the physical space, hire passionate staff who live and breathe innovation, and ensure that programs are inclusive. When you create a welcoming environment that prizes usefulness over tradition, the students won't just show up—they’ll start building the future.
Episode 85 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: That was Mary Ryan, the Vice Provost for Research and Enterprise at Imperial College in London. We had an awesome conversation about the role that entrepreneurship can play in student success. We talked through the events and programs they run and their key spaces like their enterprise lab. Mary also shares her lessons learned and advice for institutions try and embed entrepreneurial skills into their culture and curriculum.
Elliot Felix: So much of this conversation took me back to my time at MIT with its culture of making, testing, failing, learning, trying again. I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my book, The Connected College, are for you.
Elliot Felix: We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community. Their coursework and their careers. Welcome, Mary. I'm so excited about our conversation on entrepreneurship and the role that it plays in student success.
Mary Ryan: Thank you. I'm really excited to, to join you and have, have this conversation.
Elliot Felix: Tell us a little bit about what you're up to.
Mary Ryan: So my role here at Imperial is Vice Provost for Research and Enterprise. So that is 80% of my role. I'm also a professor in the materials department. The Vice Provost role involves everything at the imperial ecosystem from kind of making sure we have the right kind of environment that our community feels empowered and able and have the right facilities and infrastructure to do their best fundamental research to thinking about where interdisciplinarity fits in our system and anything that sits above the departments, the those strategic initiatives Sit, sit with me.
Mary Ryan: And then on the enterprise and entrepreneurship side, it's how, at least one of the mechanisms of how we drive impact through all that work. So IP licensing, startups, engagement with corporate partners that whole pathway, if you like, from idea to changing something in the world is joined up under my portfolio. So I like to say it's the best job at the university and I think I'm probably right.
Elliot Felix: That sounds. Sounds pretty amazing. And, and going from fundamental to applied research and idea to impact is quite the fulfilling spectrum. How did you get started in in higher ed? How did you find your way to that Best job at Imperial?
Mary Ryan: Best job at Imperial. Come in completely unexpected. I I, I always think at some point I should create some revisionist history that I had a great plan, but of course I didn't. Oh yeah, it was all planned. I'm sure I had a, I had a random walk through, through academic life and in fact I probably before I joined Imperial I, and if you'd met me, I was a, a staff scientist at Brookhaven Labs in the us so Department of Energy Lab. I would've said that I didn't want to go work in a university, that I was very happy in a lab setting, doing my own research, having my own smallish group kind of, and the freedom that, that the National Lab System gives you.
Mary Ryan: And then I guess you get to a point where there are different things you want to do. There opportunity presented themself. A job was advertised at Imperial. I applied for it, almost thinking I don't want it. But then as soon as I came here, there's a very dynamic atmosphere at Imperial. A STEM only university. So we have four faculties, natural science, engineering, medicine, and a business school. So it has a very unique flavor I think of, of how we work. It's very outputs and in impact focused as an organization. I think some of that comes from how it was founded. At least from a European context, it's relatively young.
Elliot Felix: which is what, a hundred years? 200. So it's
Mary Ryan: about no, no less than 200 years. So that after the great exhibition of 1851 which was the, the world tra trade fair prince Albert's. Created the Albertopolis system here in South Kansas. If any, any of your listeners have been to South Kensington, that might have been to the Science Museum or the Naturalist museum. The Victorian Albert Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, and the the three Science Colleges were created and the Royal School of Mines. The City and Gills College and the, the Royal College of chemistry.
Mary Ryan: In 1907, they merged to form Imperial College, so we were only officially founded in 1907. So I'd like to think we're still in, we're still in startup mode, right? Which I think says something about how we, how we operate as an organization, but the founding charters of, of Imperial was in a somewhat understated way, was to be useful. So that is our mission. To do excellent research, ethos, excellent education, but it's, it's fundamental to our ethos and how we, how we still operate. And you kind of get a sense of that when you're here. It's very much, that's brilliant work, great contribution to knowledge. Of course. That's important. And then so what, what are you doing with it?
Mary Ryan: So that yeah. Kind of permeates here. And it is quite sticky. Lots of people stay here for quite a long time.
Elliot Felix: I went to MIT and it feels akin to that ethos in terms of the, you know, our, our motto was men's at monas mind and hand, and it was about translating things into usefulness and, and impact. And I, I love that. The journey from Brookhaven nation National Labs, great work there. And also great town I that's spent three, the first three months of the pandemic in Brookhaven actually. So, yeah. You know, away from the reactor, but you know, well,
Mary Ryan: I was, I did miss having a synchrotron just across the car park. Yeah. I mean,
Elliot Felix: you've gotta have a synchrotron nearby. You've gotta have
Mary Ryan: a synchrotron in your backyard that I did that. That's, so, I missed that. But otherwise, I think it was a good move. And of course I still have collaborators back on Long Island.
Elliot Felix: You defined success in a way in terms of like taking the idea to impact and, and being useful. I'm interested to, you know, can you take that down to the level of the, of the student if that's how Imperial is successful? hOw do you define a student success within that?
Mary Ryan: I think it's easy to define what you might call activity or assessment based success. You know, how, how well did the class do, how much knowledge did they gain? All those things are important. I think I would like to define the success for each individual student as a way of thinking that we've given them. And I think that means a few things. It means that they should have high expectations and they should be free to imagine how the world can be different. So that freedom to imagine I think is really important. But then I think coming with that is an obligation to challenge. Right. This is how we think things should be done or are being done. We should always challenge that. Some of that challenge will be in, you know, deep scientific rigor. Some of that challenge will be, well, there's a different way to do this thing.
Mary Ryan: And some of that might then lead into entrepreneurship. Both of those two kind of ways of thinking, we should also have given them the skills to do something about it, right? So there's a way of thinking and there's a skills base that they need to have if they're actually gonna go out and. Change the world. It's quite a high ambition that we'd like for our students, but it's in each of us, I think, to do something transformative.
Elliot Felix: So if students come away with a way of thinking and a way of doing, and the skills to make it happen and a, a way of re-imagining how things could be, then that's success. I love it.
Mary Ryan: Correct.
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Elliot Felix: So. Know you wear multiple hats or your hat has lots of things under it, but on the enterprise entrepreneurship side of things, how do you see all those entrepreneurial activities playing a role in student success?
Mary Ryan: It's definitely provides a, a way of thinking. That is different to what you will get in your regular normal academic curricular. So one of the things that is a little bit different about Imperial's Entrepreneurial system is that we have a centralized facility if you like, we call it the Enterprise Lab. It's our entrepreneurship center for students, and it sits outside of all of the departments accessible by all of our students. And it's sector agnostic and it allows us, our students to access, a space that is a different kind of space. I mean, it literally is a physically different kind of space, but it's also a different kind of space in terms of how people can go there and engage. It's entirely extracurricular, but more than a quarter of all our students actually go and do something, one of the activities with the enterprise lab.
Mary Ryan: So it's increasingly we are hearing from our undergraduates when they arrive, you know, why have you chosen to come to Imperial? A lot of them will say, because we've heard about all the great entrepreneurship programs we've heard about the Enterprise Lab and what you can do there and how that, how that facilitates this entrepreneurship journey. And some of the outcomes of that are just, the students will come and they'll, you know, they'll learn something new. They will go through a, maybe one of our programs. And that will be it, right? They don't necessarily launch a product or a startup or take it further, but they've had that experience and that entrepreneurial thinking feeds into how they approach some of their other work.
Mary Ryan: Some of them go through many of our programs and journeys and, and end up with successful startups. It's got quite an imperial flavor, if you like, and you'll recognize this, if you've, you've also got an an MIT flavor is that we, we also embed in those programs that need to be evidence-based, right? How do you take evidence around your product, evidence about the market, evidence about the, the global trends, how different venture products work. So that kind of more technical side of entrepreneurship,
Elliot Felix: not just arm waving, not just arm hot decks.
Mary Ryan: And, and, and we want them to approach, I guess an any, anything they do actually, buddy. You know, definitely feeding into the entrepreneurship space that they should be testing a hypothesis. Not just, I've got an idea. Okay, your idea is a hypothesis. How do we turn that into something real? What does that mean? What does that mean in terms of designing the experiments or designing the pathway? And what do you learn on the way? So that, I think, is a particular flavor of how we think about it.
Elliot Felix: Give us a flavor of some of these extracurricular programs, how students learn how to come up with a hypothesis and test it using evidence.
Mary Ryan: There's multiple different events and programs that are running throughout the year. And we like to say that the students can, you know, either come with an idea, come with a product, or just come right to, to the event. We run a whole bunch of hackathons where we might have a specific theme and we put teams of people together where we deliberately mix people from across the university with a, with a specific challenge. Sometimes people will just want to come and explore in their own space, and then we might partner them with one of our entrepreneurial team or fellows and, and you know, just help 'em think, get into a space where they can think. 'cause they just want to know how do you start to have those ideas and then once they've got either as an individual or as a group, that their idea.
Mary Ryan: Some of them will have a, you know, already a product and a prototype that they've been thinking about, and we'll talk a little bit about how we enable that, that kind of physical prototyping there are typically something like four to eight week programs that we run them through, right, in terms of, okay, this is, this is how you start to think about your particular sector that you are in and recognizing there are two types of information they need to have or skills they need to have. And some of them are completely sector agnostic because they're the kind of skills everybody needs to have about, you know, collecting evidence, doing a pitch, talking to investors, they're building a team. And then there are very sector specific challenges. So if you're in Cleantech, there'll be a set of regulations, a set of policies, different markets different potential access to capital in different parts of the world. So there's this kind of underpinning platform and then pillars that are sector specific that we also walk them through.
Mary Ryan: And we do this partly with the enterprise lab, but also with some of our academic community. In the business school, we house an institute called the Institute for Deep Tech Entrepreneurship. And what happens in that program is how you get to think about value inflection. Or investible inflections, right? In an entrepreneurial pathway. So that kind of thinking as well, it's not just I'm trying to make my product better, better, better, better, better. Actually, there will be a point where your product suddenly has a threshold. In it. Incrementalism doesn't, scalability doesn't work. Incrementalism doesn't work. But it's very hard to, and if you're just sitting down and haven't thought about this before, to understand where they are. Right? So what is the, what is the, the killer demonstration or the killer piece of experimental you might need to get you to that point, right?
Elliot Felix: Target the multi touch screen that's gonna kill your keyboard, you know?
Mary Ryan: That's right. So finding those, finding those moments in the pathway, and that's, I think, a really, really important part of setting your hypothesis, right? Your hypothesis should be to test those, those pieces. On one hand it's interesting because it sort of feed, it's almost natural because it feeds into a way of thinking when you've got a STEM-based organization. But it's in a way that is counter to how they've been trained to do things. So the it, I think it's quite an important way that we, we teach this, we've got, I guess over different, in the Enterprise lab, there are 20 different programs that our students can go through. Different, you know, venture Catalyst problem challenges, where we have a big prize at the end. That's a, you know, investment opportunity to mentoring programs to, again, specific shorter courses where they're about regulation or legal advice or, or mentorship. I could keep, I could keep talking, but I'll stop there.
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Elliot Felix: Did I hear you correctly that you, you mentioned this sits kind of across or alongside your schools, so it's program or sector agnostic, but did you also mention that it's entirely extracurricular? Why aren't people coming there? Because they're taking a business planning course for credit, for instance.
Mary Ryan: They could be doing that as well. When we, when we set up the enterprise lab though, the thinking was that as soon as you give students credit for something it changes their motivation. Right. So there's always this balance. I think because there is this, for me in particular, I would love all of our students and we'll actually, we will be getting to, to this point in the next couple of years to have a label, a level of entrepreneurial skills, right? They don't have to be entrepreneurs, but they should all have a set of skills. But if it's for credit, your motivation is very different. Your teamwork is very different. Your outputs will may well be different. So it was really to get this, capture this bottom up desire that we knew that was in our community, and enable them to just bring their own ideas and be fully self-motivated, and it's been extraordinarily successful.
Elliot Felix: That's really interesting because, because it, it does run counter to where a lot of progress is being made in student success, like in terms of integrating things into the curriculum. Like if I think about career exploration, the broken paradigm for that is you go to the career development center in spare time that you don't have. And so now people are saying, okay, we need career development. Career exploration as a four credit course early in the early in the curriculum that helps students find and explore potential career paths, and then gives them a way to apply what they're learning in the classroom. And it's kind of solving the, sometimes an equity issue, sometimes a focus issue, sometimes a time issue by integrating one into the other. But what you're saying is you might kill it if you do that. And you kind of have to keep it, you might lose the special sauce if you don't keep it separate.
Mary Ryan: I think there's, there is a risk of that and it, and it does come back to what are you, what are you trying to achieve? There is an interesting question and about what are the levels of skills that you would like all of your students to have. Yeah. So a quarter of our students doing this extracurricular is a huge number to choose. That tells me three quarters are not doing that. So I would like all of those to have a basic level of understanding what entrepreneurship is about. And so thinking about how those pieces get embedded in our baseline curricula, I think is important because we are stem, there are many exemplars that we can pull through right in our natural curricular, rather than saying, here's a separate, here's a separate program where you've done their business plan and you've, but actually here's a, here's a case study on X company and how it started up and moved forward that will be aligned to the curriculum. So that's one of the ways that we kind of smatter it around.
Mary Ryan: We've just been through our new strategy. We launched our new strategy last year and, and in that we've got a program called Class of 2030 where we are thinking about, alright, what are the key skills that future generations need, right? They all need to be AI literate. They all need to understand sustainability. I think they all should understand systems thinking they all should have a level of entrepreneurial skills. So we're building some of those programs that we'll sit across as well as we speak. So that is kind of, we'll sit on top of this.
Elliot Felix: So it becomes like a both and
Mary Ryan: both and, yeah. But I think as soon as you elevate one of these things to a, a high credit level. You're changing the student's interaction with that topic.
Elliot Felix: So you can have courses on customer discovery or market research or business planning or scenario planning or prototyping. But where you might draw the line is a course on creating some kind of new venture because then, then you're at cross purposes.
Mary Ryan: Yeah, I think that's right. One of our most successful courses in terms of creative spin outs is a joint degree that we run between our Department of Design engineering and the Royal College of Art, which is just next door so it's called Integrated Design Engineering. And in that cohort they, they have a kind of a teamwork project where the groups are asked to think about design solutions to challenge us. Think of a challenge, global challenge, and think of a design solution on the back of that program. Many of those students take the outcomes of that and go off and go to actually, they take that and then they go to Enterprise Lab and they start a startup. It's by far the kind of the biggest feeder. Our startup creation program, but the endpoint objective is not to make a startup, right? It's to think about how you create a design solution for the problem and the nature of how that program works. You know, particularly seed some of these startup ideas.
Elliot Felix: So it's clear you're thinking about the future, you're thinking about, what the class of 2030 looks like and the skills they need. How do you see entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial programs, venture activity? How do you see these things changing? And how you're trying to get out in front of that?
Mary Ryan: I think what we are seeing is, well, you all know this better than me probably, but a, a big shift in career prospects and trajectories and, and the desire to have more control of career. But from, from the next generation, they are much more wanting to think about how to engage in the startup space. One of the other things we've actually done in, in response to that is on, on one of our campuses, which is our deep tech campus out in White City where our incubator hackspace scale up programs work on campus. We've got about a hundred startups. Some of them imperial, some of'em not. And over the summers now we fund an internship program for our own students to be seconded into one of the startups. For three months. So for many years we've done, you know, undergraduate research opportunities going to a lab. So this is the, the startup equivalent of that. And we've done it two years now. First year was a little bit, nobody point you. What does this mean? Will it work? The startups loved it. 'cause they get a pair of hands for the summer.
Mary Ryan: And the students loved it because it was a very different environment and they got a taste of that. So we're gonna, we're gonna try to scale that up over the next, the next year. But increasingly we are finding our students wanting to know about it, seeing that as a career option for them. So it's probably just as many now as would, would say, well, I'm gonna go work in a, you know, a big. I work in industry, or I'm gonna go work in, many will work in a bank finance 'cause we're, we're STEM people. But it's, it's becoming really at the forefront of a large fraction of our students' ambitions.
Elliot Felix: The startup internship program is so smart because it's often only, it's not the startups at the, it's the end ups that have the you know, the infrastructure to, to create a formal internship program and to create a good experience. That's mutually beneficial. So giving a little structure to that so a bunch of small organizations can do it, I think is really awesome.
Mary Ryan: And at the end of the summer we have a day where each of the interns presents what they've done with the startup and they have a, you know, like a celebration, but that then also brings the startups together, right? To, to create. Yeah. They probably get some ideas from each other and share, share resources. Fascinating.
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Elliot Felix: So whether it's through your four to eight, eight week programs, the events, the hackathons, the internships can you talk a little bit about some of the skills, some of the outcomes, some of the takeaways that students get?
Mary Ryan: There's one other thing I would just say that we've been doing in the last few years that is also really important to the entrepreneurial training, which is, which are two things. One is we've been doing some venture tracks to the US. So taking some of our student startups, we took some to New York during climate week. We took some to the Bay Area. We've got a, an Imperial office in San Francisco, so having a hub there where we can think about facilitating those exchanges. So that's one global piece that we do. The other thing we do is we have a global hackathon where we bring together a bunch of our students, students from Tu Munich who are one of our key strategic partners and the University of Ghana, where we also have another hub and that different international dynamic. In terms of different, the way different cultures. Also think about entrepreneurship and think about ideas for challenges.
Mary Ryan: They've been really important in giving a bit more of a global perspective. What you also see when you take students from Europe to the US is, it raises their ambition. 'cause they have a, a much bigger sense of what's possible because the, you know, the environment is, is so much, I guess, more conducive from a venture capital perspective. And the culture is a, again, more advanced, I would say, if this is, if this is not a, a, a conflation of terms or a contradiction in terms. The culture is more accustomed to allowing failure, right? And so what you find in Europe is it's, you will have people that have one startup and then they, if it fails, they go, ah. Whereas in the US it's almost, well, this is my fourth startup. All the others failed. And that's great.
Mary Ryan: And so one of the pieces that that gives them is I think, a little different insight into the benefits of failure. So what do you take away? How is that a learning moment rather than a crushing moment? Right? So that cultural exchange is really important to our students and trying to bring that failure as learning, because you've tested a hypothesis and something didn't work and that's fine. You'd build a new one. So try to bring that, into the forefront of our students' experience, to give them that capability I think is important. So raising their ambition, what is possible, you know, learning from failure is, is really critical.
Mary Ryan: I think for some of the things that I think are key takeaways that I hope. No, I know our students get from the program are things like the importance of flexibility. The importance of understanding where the opportunity is and being prepared for it. You can't, you know, you can't necessarily, I, there's, there's all kinds of terrible metaphors about making your own look, but being prepared dance favors the prepared mind. Correct, correct. But having that confidence, but also preparedness to take those opportunities. I think that's really important. The other thing we find is a really clear characteristic of our successful student entrepreneurs is just being really open to coaching and open to learning and recognizing that there's a wealth of expertise and opportunity and advice around them and soaking it up right and seek, and continuing to seek out that learning.
Mary Ryan: So. I think being always open to advice, finding the things you need to learn and keep growing is a, a really key characteristic. I'm not sure you can teach that, but it's something that we notice and, and we've created, well we say we've created, the team of the enterprise lab have done an amazing job of creating a culture where students that go through that program really help each other and then after they graduate and move on, they still come back and help and monitor mon mentor and support the next generation. And so those learnings, it's, you know, I can sit here and say, you, you should be talking to mentors and you should be doing this. But actually students that have done it, they've been through the program that come back and talk to 'em about their experiences, give them that advice, is 10 times more valuable than me talking to the students. So making sure we use our own Ecosystem and our own students graduates to help the next generation.
Elliot Felix: I love all the things that they take away. They've got, this ability to imagine the skills, to do it, to challenge things. They've got raised ambition, they've got global perspectives. They've got membership in a, in a network connections to mentors. And they've got a different perspective on failure and learning from failure. Is, is prototyping, is seeing, seeing that failure, is that, is that part of it?
Mary Ryan: Sometimes it is, and sometimes just the, the ability to go and make the thing you've imagined. Right? So we've created back to being useful, right? Back to being, back to being useful. So we have a really well busy, super busy. We have a hack space out on our White City campus. Again, that's accessible for all our students and there are the things you would expect in there. Lots of 3D printers. All of course, all our students can do cad, so they just design the thing they wanna print and they print it. But we also have, and I'm gonna use the expression at old school, which is probably not the right one, but, you know, blades and drills and saws and drill, you know, the, the kind of proper woodworking and metalworking.
Mary Ryan: But then we also have some things that are a little bit different. So we have both a, a chemical and a biological hack space. The biological one is pretty unusual and the health and safety. Getting that right around that was a bit of a challenge, setting it up, but it, you know, allows that much more you'll play with the virus. Go play with the, we've got, we've run it very carefully, but having access to some of that stuff for our more advanced students is a massive benefit. But then we also have found increasingly requests from our students for what you might describe as kind of traditional crafts. So we've just installed a, you know, a new sewing room. With, with sewing machines and, you know, people making new fibers and people wanting to hest new ways of making fabrics from artificial materials. So that kind of marriage of kind of the, the craft and the high tech under one roof is a, a really exciting place to be.
Elliot Felix: It's like digital, physical, analog, you know? All of that old school, new school, all coming together.
Mary Ryan: And on the side of that, we've got something that, building that, there's something called the Makerspace, which is a smaller version of that, which has, you know, some prototyping facilities that is for the local community. So high school kids can come in and use our 3D printers if they've also got an idea and they want to do something. That community engagement and trying to think about how you push out some of that thinking and skills into the high school before they even think about going to college. Is, is part of that whole, that whole space.
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Elliot Felix: Very cool. So last question is really, given all the thinking you've done about how things are changing and the class of 2030 and the impacts that the program is yielding for your students in society, what advice do you have for other institutions about how to adapt to those changes? How to inject this kind of enterprise thinking and entrepreneurship into their institutions.
Mary Ryan: I think probably the first thing I would say is, your students are already better at this and ready for this than you think they are. And a lot of what is needed is that space and flexibility and support to, to be able to take that step. I would say building programs where people can see how they access specific types of skills and training. Especially when you're first starting up trying to build, build this ecosystem. It can just look like a rather complicated space to access, right? So how do you think about what are the different demographs you want to bring in? Right? You talked about equity earlier. We run a very specific program for women entrepreneurs. Because looking at evidence, you can see massive underrepresentation. So by calling out a very specific program, we gave access to a certain demographic of people who previously would've gone actually, no, that's not for me.
Mary Ryan: So thinking about who you want to encourage in and making it as easy as possible. The space is really important for that, right? The space has to be welcoming and not feel like you're coming into an exam. The staff, you have to hire the people who are passionate about it, right? It's a lot of work to build a program at this and to keep it running. The people with the right skills and the right passion are absolutely critical. Gain the people in and then it will, you will build it and the students will come. And then you'll be over, you'll be saturated. You'll have to build a bigger program, which is, which is where we we're constantly now thinking how do we expand some of these activities so more of our students can access it.
Elliot Felix: A nice, a nice problem to have. Well, Mary, thanks for all your insights and, and how you take ideas to implementation and how you're useful in the world for, for students and, and society. Really inspiring stuff.
Mary Ryan: Thank you for having me. Great conversation.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the connected college podcast. Subscribe to my Connected College Newsletter at ElliotFelix. com for insights and excerpts from my book, tools you can download, and special offers. You can also find more information about talks I've given, articles I've written, and upcoming events there, and please support the podcast by rating and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where students will succeed.