Family’s donation to Ohio State starts entrepreneurship center

Ohio State University students will have a new entrepreneurship resource thanks to a $ 17 million gift, the university announced Monday.

The Tim and Kathleen Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship will focus on cultivating students’ entrepreneurial skills and creating an extracurricular experience around entrepreneurship.

The Keenan Family Foundation made the commitment to Ohio State’s Max M. Fisher College of Business to establish the entrepreneurship center. Through the center, students will be connected to the “startup ecosystem,” the university said.

The Keenan Family Foundation was established in 2012. Tim Keenan, an Ohio State alumnus, is a member of the dean’s advisory council within the business college and has served as an adviser to the Ohio State Office of Research. Through his foundation, he also committed $ 1 million to the business college in 2013 to support technology entrepreneurship and commercialization education.

With the new entrepreneurship center, Keenan said, he hopes to position Ohio State as “a thought leader and focal point of action for the Midwest and the nation as a whole.”

“We are confident that the talented students of Ohio State, combined with the faculty and staff, will position the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship as an impact leader across all industries, and that it will be a driving contributor to job creation in Ohio and the nation,” Tim Keenan said in statement released by the university Monday.

The center also must be approved by the Ohio State Board of Trustees.