Like many cities, Chattanooga has a significant poverty rate, with 18% of its residents living in poverty. The Urban Vision Initiative was established to address this issue by increasing wealth-building and reducing poverty among economically and socially underrepresented communities within Chattanooga's urban core. UVI, a program within the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, offers entrepreneurs instruction and mentoring to help their businesses grow and achieve profitability quickly. A key aspect of the program is pairing entrepreneurs with student consultants from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga who provide support in areas such as marketing, accounting, and business management. Before being matched with the entrepreneurs, the students receive training to ensure they are well-equipped to offer sound advice. Shateria Smith, founder of SimplyProps, and a member of the first UVI cohort, said the challenge of building her business has been made easier through the support provided by UVI. “UVI has been instrumental in uncovering blind spots in my business,” Smith said. Cardell Davis, co-founder of The Transition: Digitally Evolving, helps businesses rebrand through demographic research. He praised the UVI program for the business and community connections it provides. Other businesses in the inaugural class of UVI include a restaurant celebrating African cuisine and culture, a store featuring apparel for mothers and children, a bridal boutique, an event design company, a security company, a pressure washing company, and a headlight restoration company. UVI is making a significant impact in Chattanooga by empowering entrepreneurs, helping them grow their businesses and achieve their goals.

Over the course of our five-year history, we’ve learned that our small size and modest budget require us to be innovative and entrepreneurial in how we run the CIE and that working as a team is imperative. This approach requires supportive leadership, the ability to draw on the entrepreneurial mindset and skillsets of others, and mutual trust. Our leadership must allow the team to experiment, fail, and learn.

We’ve also learned that entrepreneurship can benefit everyone and is not merely about starting a business. Entrepreneurial thinking is the leadership skillset of the 21st Century—it provides the skills needed to lead in times and situations of uncertainty and ambiguity. This perspective underlies our mission to spread entrepreneurship across our campus and throughout our community.

We’ve learned that we must play an active role in our entrepreneurial ecosystem and our economy. When our community told us they wanted to engage university researchers with the economy, we responded by creating a research commercialization program. It is our responsibility to use the power of entrepreneurship to address the needs of the underserved in our community and elsewhere, whether they be disabled military veterans or people from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods trying to build a business for themselves and their families. Finally, we’ve learned that developing entrepreneurship skills is essential to the education of our students and the vitality of our regional economy. Being able to measure these skills in a clinical way gives us the ability to track skill development and objectively measure impact.

As we map our future, our team aims to further expand our reach–and the reach of entrepreneurship–across our university’s campus and throughout our community. We will shift our Readiness Inventory for Successful Entrepreneurship (RISE) Pilot Program for developing student skills from a voluntary effort to a broader program for all our Entrepreneurship majors and minors. We will continue to grow our initiative to bring courses and students from across the campus to our makerspace for prototyping and other maker projects.

Our research commercialization program is developing an initiative to provide business students with paid work to support our university’s researchers with expertise on market research to assist the latter in their commercialization efforts. Our Commercialization Counsellor is helping other regional universities in Tennessee to develop commercialization programs of their own, using our model.

We are working with the Tennessee Small Business Development Center (TSBDC) to create an internship program for our students that will give them the opportunity to work with a diverse array of enterprises and provide the TSBDC with expertise they do not currently have. We have entered into an agreement with The Company Lab (Co.Lab), an important entrepreneurship accelerator in the Chattanooga region, to assist their efforts to accelerate companies in the sustainable mobility space, while benefiting our students and faculty. We are collaborating with the Urban League in Chattanooga and Nashville to help them measure and develop the skills of their minority entrepreneurs, using the RISE assessment platform.

We are just getting started!