Pannenberg, steering committee co-chairperson of this year’s Global Entrepreneurship Week at UNC, which starts today, said she hopes the week draws people of all kinds — whether they are working on the next startup to change the world or just have a remote interest in entrepreneurship itself.
“I think that there is a big stigma around entrepreneurship that it is only for people who have business ideas,” she said. “I really think that Global Entrepreneurship Week and the innovation community at UNC can really change the narrative around that and show that anybody with an idea can become an entrepreneur.”
Besides speaker panels, the week will include networking opportunities, startup showcases and competitions — including the Carolina Challenge Pitch Party — as well as free support services from community partners, where students can ask legal and accounting questions.
“The idea is to show that entrepreneurship is not just a buzzword out there, but is really a part of every sector in the economy, that it is part of every problem we are trying to solve,” said Mathilde Verdier, program coordinator of UNC’s Social Innovation Initiative and co-chairperson of the steering committee for UNC’s entrepreneurship week.
Verdier said Judith Cone, now special assistant to the chancellor for innovation and entrepreneurship, helped launch the first Global Entrepreneurship Week while she was working at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in 2008.
Cone pitched the idea to UNC four years ago, Verdier said in an email, and now UNC is ranked as one of the top two university partners nationally for Global Entrepreneurship Week.
This year, UNC’s week will include its first panel on diversity. Henry McKoy, a mentor in residence for the CUBE at the Campus Y, said “Entrepreneurship Diverse Lenses” will be about UNC driving the conversation around inclusivity in innovation and looking at diversity in many ways, from race to geography.
“As the United States becomes more majority-minority over the next 25 years ... it’s just incredibly important that everybody be at the table,” McKoy said.
