Entrepreneurial Events at Penn State

Many of the entrepreneurial organizations in the Penn State area host speaker events, training sessions, and networking events.

Innoblue attempts to maintain a comprehensive list of these events through use of a publicly viewable google calendar.

If you have a google account, you can actually have these events automatically pulled into your calendar by using the "Add Us" feature on our events page.

If you know of entrepreneurial events that are not listed, please contact us with the event information so that we can include them.

Penn State Academic Entrepreneurship Offerings

Many courses offered at Penn State are highly applicable for students' current or future entrepreneurial endeavors.

Innoblue tries to maintain an updated list of entrepreneurship-related courses at Penn State.

If you know of entrepreneurship-related courses that are not listed, please contact us with the course information so that we can include them.

Also, plans are currently in development for the launch of a university-wide entrepreneurship minor program in 2013, designed to expand upon the current engineering entrepreneurship minor.

Startup Tools

Innoblue provides a list of our favorite startup tools, which include categories like website creation, email, analytics, project management, and more

Innoblue also offers links to more comprehensive lists, such as PBworks' categorized list of 470 startup tools.

We recommend browsing the lists to stumble upon something valuable, or using ctrl+f to find something specific.

Do yourself a favor by taking advantage of these tools, which can make your life much easier by saving you a ton of time.

Learn Entrepreneurship

One of the best ways to learn rapidly is to imitate successful entrepreneurs and study the mentalities and strategies of those experts.

Innoblue compiled a list of resources (startup news sources, websites, and blogs) that contains highly valuable reading material for any entrepreneur.

This resource list also provides links to Penn State Linkedin networks that are connected to startups, which creates opportunities for the community to connect.

Funding

Investment capital in the Penn State area can be hard to find since State College is far away from any major city and thus lacks angel investment groups or active venture capitalists.

But like any true entrepreneur, if you are passionate about your idea and confident in your ability to execute, you should not be intimidated by challenging circumstances, such as a low availability of funding.

Instead of giving up, you can bootstrap as much as possible and try your hand at the local funding options.

Innoblue co-founder, Jon Tornetta, compiled a list of potential funding options at Penn State and in the State College area, which can serve as a guideline for you if you choose to seek investment locally.

PSU Startups

Though we may not hear about their stories as frequently as large corporations, Penn State does actually have a strong track record of alumni entrepreneurs.

Innoblue provides a brief snapshot of some of the startup companies that are rooted with Penn State blood, at both the student level and the alumni level

If you have suggestions of companies to add to our list, please contact us so we can include that information.

Learn To Code

If you are interested in the world of tech startups, it is extremely beneficial to understand web development (aka coding or programming).

If you cannot code, you're options are to find a technical co-founder (this is often hard), learn to code yourself (resources here), or hire an external team (also a challenge).

You may or may not become a web development expert, but learning to code will help you understand the building process and usually earn you more respect from developers than the guys who don't try to learn.

Since Penn State is not unique in there being a much greater demand for developers than supply, we want to make sure you have the resources to learn to code, and encourage you to join many of our members in that endeavor.