Mike Bradshaw named entrepreneur-in-residence
UTC’s Gary W. Rollins College of Business has named Mike Bradshaw as the first entrepreneur-in-residence in the UTC Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship was established in 2018 to engage, equip and encourage UTC’s innovators and entrepreneurs. The center supports the entire UTC community through cross-campus programming and initiatives, and addresses UTC’s strategic goal to “Inspire, nurture and empower scholarship, creativity, discovery, innovation and entrepreneurial initiatives.”
As entrepreneur-in-residence, Bradshaw will re-energize the Idea Central Living-Learning Community, a program in which students with an interest in entrepreneurship live together while learning more about the field and opportunities to pursue it on campus and in the community. He will also oversee a mentor program for student and faculty entrepreneurs, develop a Startup Internship Program, act as a coach in CIE’s pilot program for measuring and developing entrepreneurship skills and lead other initiatives that spread entrepreneurship across the UTC campus and better connect the CIE to the Chattanooga Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.
Bradshaw, a lifelong entrepreneur, has helped build businesses in diverse industries including startups in hospitality, software, digital publishing and high-speed internet. As the former executive director of The Company Lab, a UTC alum and a currently serving adjunct professor at UTC, he is devoted to UTC and Chattanooga’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
“UTC was instrumental to the emergence of Chattanooga’s startup community over the past decade,” Bradshaw said. “In fact, UTC students and graduates accounted for the largest number of participants in the Company Lab’s programs of any institution in the region.”