University of Miami Parent Guide
The Launch Pad at Toppel
- Published: August 3, 2011
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The Launch Pad at Toppel
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The Launch Pad is UM’s innovative entrepreneurship initiative. It uniquely presents entrepreneurship as a viable career option and encourages and enables all members of the university community to start new ventures—whether for profit or not for profit—in South Florida.
A University of Miami goal is for students and alumni from all its twelve schools to consider entrepreneurship as a legitimate career path. As part of UM’s Toppel Career Center, The Launch Pad reaches an unusually broad range of students and has generated an extraordinary response on the UM campus and in the local community.
Since August 2008, over 900 business concepts have received consulting from Launch Pad staff, and over 75 new businesses have been opened, creating over 150 jobs.
The Launch Pad’s programs are co-curricular and voluntary by design. Pragmatic, concrete, and experiential, they provide the just-in-time knowledge entrepreneurs need to assess and develop their ideas and plans for a new enterprise.
The Launch Pad offers guidance, encouragement, and immediate access to a dedicated local commercial network. The Launch Pad fulfills a key educational obligation: to teach learners not just how to find a job but also how to make a job.
The Launch Pad sponsors regular programming—workshops, seminars, and networking events—and maintains a website that is both a clearinghouse of events and resources and a searchable database for finding team members, strategic partners, and service providers.
A pioneering grant from the Blackstone Charitable Foundation is replicating The Launch Pad in two universities in Detroit and in other regions of the nation as well. The program is known as the Blackstone LaunchPad.
- Published: August 3, 2011
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