Location:

USF Alumni Center, Traditions Hall on January 29th, 2010.

The USF College of Business Administration and BNFE’s 2010 Celebration of Entrepreneurship Luncheon was a huge success. Over 100 attendees, such as area business leaders, USF officials, and our graduate students, participated in the inaugural event. The luncheon hailed the Entrepreneurship master’s program along with the introduction of our new scholarship endowment.

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Certainly, one of the event highlights included the surprise announcement of naming the scholarship after Dr. Michael Fountain.

Later in the spring term, Dr. Fountain was also featured in the Gulf Coast Business Review discussing the Entrepreneurship in Applied Technologies program at USF.

Excerpt from the article:

Michael Fountain’s vision for USF’s entrepreneurship program is built on his own experiences.

That vision focuses on the synthesis of business skill, biomedical
research and engineering capability into a successful business
operation.

Fountain’s research experience has taken him from Princeton, N.J. to
Silicon Valley to Philadelphia, and has included the formation of seven
companies, three of which have gone public.

Here in Tampa Bay, Fountain’s work has helped Dermazone Solutions —
a company featured in a December 2009 issue of the Review — bring its
advanced skin care products to market.

Bringing the fruits of researchers’ labor to market drives USF’s
entrepreneurship program. It’s a unique opportunity for biochemists and
pharmaceutical researchers with an entrepreneurial itch.

It’s a focus that has helped individuals like Kevin Sill, chief
scientific officer at Intezyne, make their own waves in the business
world instead of signing on with a pharmaceutical giant.

Take the latest addition to the program’s curriculum, for example, a
class called product development. Inside, students work with existing
companies to design and test innovative concepts that fit real-world
needs.

Other classes take on challenges like patents and federal compliance
— think FDA approval for a drug. They’re concepts that you wouldn’t
learn in either a chemistry lab or an MBA setting.

Put it all together and you get a unique educational opportunity that Fountain calls “a truly green field to plow.”

(To read more, click on link).