In recent years, Rhode Island’s entrepreneurial community – once a relatively quiet landscape – has made significant strides, says RIHub Executive Director Annette Tonti, with a growing number of innovation services, Rhode Island-founded ventures and out-of-state startups expanding into the Ocean State.
But another key source of entrepreneurial energy – the state’s colleges and universities – remains largely behind the curve compared with regional and nationwide competition, Tonti says.
While observers have highlighted Rhode Island’s colleges and universities as significant attractions for entrepreneurial talent, much of this potential remains untapped, Tonti said.
“It doesn’t mean [startups] aren’t there, but we certainly haven’t seen them the way we think we should,” Tonti said.
To help bring Rhode Island’s higher education landscape up to speed with its competition, RIHub and local higher education leaders are partnering to form the University Network of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Convened by RIHub, the group, composed of college and university officials with an innovation focus, will begin meeting this month.
The group’s purpose is straightforward: Bring together all of Rhode Island’s colleges and universities to network and share innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities.
“The reason to do that is to help foster even more high-growth startups coming out of our universities here in Rhode Island,” Tonti said. “If you look at the data, many of our universities are woefully behind” in producing startups.
In 2011, research from the University of Notre Dame found that on average, universities produced 2.5 fundable startups per year, with some achieving up to 55. Since that time, Tonti suspects this average has gone up, but she has also observed that most Rhode Island universities aren’t hitting this mark.
It doesn’t need to be that way, Tonti says – Rhode Island has the second-highest population of college students in relation to its overall residency, according to research by Insurify insurance comparison shopping company.
“We have a lot of college students here, and we’d like to see more of them compelled to build these high-growth startups,” Tonti said. Students “maybe don’t know that’s a pathway, or don’t know all the support structures they can get through the universities and in Rhode Island.”
There are some exceptions in the state’s higher education landscape: most notably, Brown University, which hosts a robust entrepreneurial community at its Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship.
But other schools, lacking the level of funding and resources available at Brown, remain behind the curve.
That’s apparent at the CIC Providence LLC, which includes RIHub’s headquarters and many of its clients.
The center itself has experienced standout growth compared with the CIC’s global network of “innovation campuses,” more than doubling in occupancy since prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and currently boasting 180 business clients and more than 600 individuals.
Around half of the CIC Providence’s clients are affiliated with universities, says Tim Rowe, founder and CEO of the CIC network.
For RIHub startups in particular, the bulk of university ties, at 42, stem from Brown, according to RIHub data. Another 24 are associated with URI, three with Bryant University and two with Johnson & Wales University. The state’s other colleges and universities don’t currently have any representation among this group.
Rowe and Stacey Messier, general manager of the CIC Providence, say that having a dedicated entrepreneurship center tends to give university startup scenes a sizable boost. Rhode Island’s leading entrepreneur-producing university, Brown, has the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, while URI has an Innovate@URI campus initiative, for instance.
But many schools – especially those with multiple colleges under one umbrella – sometimes “have trouble connecting the dots,” Messier said.
Through UNIE discussions, members hope to fill in these gaps.
Similar groups exist in other states – for example, the Texas University Network for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which formed in 2008 and includes 17 of the state’s colleges and universities.
In addition to inspiration, UNIE draws a former member from this Texas-based network: David Altounian, vice provost of graduate and professional studies at Salve Regina University, was involved with TUNIE for almost a decade before moving to Rhode Island in late 2021.
During that time, Altounian worked at St. Edward’s University, a small liberal arts school in Austin, Texas.
Like Salve Regina, St. Edwards wasn’t known for the large research capacities associated with institutions such as Brown or URI. But the university’s involvement with TUNIE helped to foster a mutually beneficial relationship between its students and TUNIE’s more research-intensive members, such as the University of Texas at Austin.
At some colleges, “the benefit is that students are well-studied, great at critical thinking but not likely doing the kind of research that is going to launch the next bio innovation,” Altounian said. “But many of their skills are complementary to research.”
There are multiple ways UNIE can forge these connections between the state’s universities, Altounian says, such as opening entrepreneurial events organized by one institution to all area college students.
Altounian and Tonti both say that university-based startup growth would go beyond benefiting students, as it would attract talent to the area and supply high-paying jobs.
“It’s one of the things to move the needle on economic strength in a region,” Tonti said.