In the Spring of 2009, six undergraduate seniors in the College of Business Administration approached CBA’s Dean Thomas E. Moore with the concept for creating IDEA.
The founders of IDEA recognized that Northeastern’s students and alumni/ae were highly entrepreneurial. Regardless of their academic disciplines, many members of the greater University community had ideas for ventures while they were at school and after they graduated. While highly motivated and innovative, the founders realized most of these entrepreneurs faced very real obstacles in building their ventures.
- Unless they were a CBA student or alumni/ae, they had little opportunity to enroll in entrepreneurial courses to learn about starting a company
- There was no resource on campus that helped ventures assemble their plans, build teams, get introduced to resources, or have access to funding sources.
IDEA’s purpose was to take CBA’s knowledge about venture creation as well as its network of resources inside and outside the University and offer them to the larger University community of aspiring entrepreneurs.
In the spring of 2009, Dean Moore approved the creation of IDEA and immediately committed CBA resources to help the founders build the organization. Dean Moore registered IDEA as a University Program so that it could utilize the CBA Development Office to raise money. A CBA faculty adviser was assigned to the team to support their efforts. In 2010, IDEA funded its first ventures through the Gap Fund. In 2011 with great support from Acting Dean Harry Lane, IDEA opened office space in Hayden Hall where ventures can meet with the IDEA team.
