Baker Institute for Entrepreneurship, Creativity and Innovation
Whitaker Lab 318, 5 East Packer Ave, Bethlehem, PA 18015, (610) 758-5626 www.lehigh.edu/entrepreneurship
Lisa Getzler, Executive Director
The Baker Institute for Entrepreneurship, Creativity and Innovation actively fosters and champions the entrepreneurial culture at Lehigh to advance creativity and innovation for economic, cultural and social development. The Baker Institute is designed to create a culture of entrepreneurship across the university, promote innovative thinking and the realization of entrepreneurial ideas in any field. To that end, the principal goals of the Institute are to:
- Nurture the creative entrepreneurial mindset and skills—in any discipline—among students, faculty, staff and the community to develop a culture committed and able to bring about transformative change;
- Provide opportunities for Lehigh students of all disciplines, levels, and backgrounds to graduate with the skills, experience and attitudes necessary to move creative ideas and new solutions for social problems successfully into sustainable practice;
- Provide supporting infrastructure that enables and significantly increases the likelihood of practical scaling up of innovative ideas and technologies to implementation and launch of new organizations.
Based squarely on a cross-university approach, the Baker Institute aims to expand the creative pipeline of innovation-related curricular and extra-curricular opportunities for students, faculty and the broader community. The Baker Institute serves as an umbrella organization to support and help coordinate, deepen and improve synergies among the substantial network of entrepreneurship-related programs on campus. By expanding resources for that network, and serving as a visible central portal, the Institute champions, highlights and promotes entrepreneurship opportunities on campus and throughout the community.
Institute operations include:
- Strategic oversight for enhancing internal and external exposure and competitively differentiating Lehigh’s overall entrepreneurship activities as a whole greater than its parts;
- Offering immersive experiences to augment curriculum, together with youth and enhanced executive education programs;
- Managing and expanding entrepreneurship-related competitions and clubs;
- Leveraging opportunities for partnerships with government agencies and economic development organizations (national, state and local).
The Baker Institute also supports the entrepreneurship-related activities of academic departments and programs by:
- Funding curricular innovation and materials;
- Modifying existing courses to incorporate entrepreneurial thinking;
- Piloting new courses in disciplines across the entire university;
- Exploring alternative structures for courses and course delivery, such as scheduling outside conventional calendar, short courses, modular courses, and Web delivery;
- Organizing cross-college curricular coordination, synergies, and continuous improvement;
- Championing the development of new models of faculty, staff and student incentives to reward and promote entrepreneurial pursuits across many fields;
- Assisting faculty and student start-ups;
- Fostering mentoring relationships,
- Proof-of-concept and early stage venture funding, and
- Facilitating technology transfer, spin-outs, and other forms of commercial and social venture creation;
- Cost-sharing to attract entrepreneurial faculty, researchers, and visiting entrepreneurs for departments across a wide range of disciplines.
The overall objective of the Institute is to cultivate the ability of our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members to develop new ideas that produce innovations and sustainable organizations with economic, technical and social benefit.
