By MARTY LEVINE

 

“We help students start startups and that's not a bad goal, but it's not the goal of every student,” said Rhonda Schuldt, director of the Big Idea Center, at Staff Council’s latest Coffee and Conversation event on October 15.

 

The Big Idea Center, in the Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship, runs competitions and workshops, offering mentorship and funding to develop student business ideas. Last year, Schuldt said, the center surveyed a swath of students about its services, and a significant number answered, “‘I don't really have an idea, but I'm curious’” – they were “not yet at the stage where they want to explore the center,” she said. Then she realized: “There is an audience here that's looking for something. We're not drawing them in. What is it that we need to know about them, so that we can we can figure out what it is that they're looking for and we can create” resources for this group as well?

 

The center already knows “our Startup Sams,” she said – those raring to take a business from idea to commercialization – “but we also have the Curious Caseys who wanted to dive in, but they didn't have a place to figure that out, and that drove us to create our new ChangeMaker program,” a five-session class that includes guest speakers and the chance to work with other students at this very early stage. 

 

As a result, she said, “last year, we saw an incredible increase in student participation, almost double what we've seen in the past. We typically, over the last five years, have had about 14-1500 student engagements per year. Last year was 2600. … We have a different way of talking about the opportunities that exist for students when they step into innovation and entrepreneurship.

 

“One of the things that we also see is, when the world changes in ways that create uncertainty, students are looking for a way to give themselves power and agency over what their future looks like,” she added.

 

Schuldt has had a passion and talent for entrepreneurship for many years. “I was led here just by choices over the course of my career,” she said. “It was not something that was planned or destined. I didn't intend to teach, to educate, to help people be innovative and entrepreneurial. but I had a thread through my career where everything that I really got involved in, that I loved doing, had purpose, meaning and was trying to make change in various different ways, to have a greater impact. At the end of the day, that's really what innovation and entrepreneurship is. It's creating new ways of solving problems, doing so in a way that can be sustained…””

 

Born in Louisiana, Schuldt moved with her family to several parts of the U.S., following her father’s Air Force service and then his business career. She grew up in the Midwest, mainly in Kansas City. When she married and her husband was transferred here several decades ago, Schuldt landed in Pittsburgh. “We didn't figure we were going to stay here,” she said. “We figured we were here five to seven years.” But eventually, “we decided this was home. 

 

Starting her own company came as an outgrowth of a temp job she took with the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, now called the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance. The conference was undertaking a regional economic revitalization strategy. Five years of overseeing the implementation of that effort taught Schuldt “how do you bring disparate people together around a common vision to create something and create change. When I left there, I'm like, that's what I want to do, but I want to do it for a lot of different organizations.” So she created a consulting company, Synergos Group, which for more than 20 years advised for-profit companies and nonprofits as well as civic organizations “who were either starting something new or going through change, where you really had to look at what needed to happen and for whom and why, and work to build that common vision.”

 

Asked for her top advice for those wishing to advance in business, she offered: “Don't stop connecting with people. Networking isn't where you go up and shake hands and hand out business cards and all of that kind of thing. [It is] staying connected to people and finding out those points of intersection that you might have in common and how you can support each other in small ways, big ways or other ways.”

 

That’s how she ended up at Pitt: “There were a lot of people that I had worked with when I first moved to Pittsburgh. We did a lot of amazing things together, but we kind of lost track of each other and I just wanted to reconnect. I made a promise to myself to reach out and have coffee with people.” That included an individual who had become one of the first entrepreneurs-in-residence at the School of Business. At the time, she explained, the school’s dean was beginning to bring in more individuals with whom undergraduates could work, should they desire to create a startup business. 

 

“I stepped in at a time that the innovation institute was just forming and student programming was just coming on to campus” through the new Big Idea Center, being led by Schuldt’s predecessor, Babs Carryer. Working with students beginning in 2015, Schuldt noted, “I just fell in love with their enthusiasm and their promise and their energy to do really impactful things.” As an entrepreneur-in-residence herself, she “again got to work with the students and the amazing things that they were trying outside of class, which blew me away, and had the opportunity when [Carryer] was retiring to consider the role. I never had to be responsible to a giant organization in a very long time, but I said yes, because the pull of the opportunity was so much that I had the opportunity to work with students in a very deep way, every single day.

The next Staff Council Coffee and Conversation is with Matthew Sterne, vice chancellor for Business Services, Nov. 19, 10:30 a.m., at the University Club.