Henneberg, Austin 3/31/13 ENC 1101 The UCF Innovation Club The discourse community I chose to observe is the

UCF innovation club. The UCF innovation club is a community full of UCF students who utilize their research and technology to benefit the public. The club helps students commercialize their hard work so they can have a more successful future. The structure of the management consists of Himanshu Pagey, co-founder and CEO, Mukundan Venkataraman (co-founder), Mohammad Zubair Ahmed (co-founder and VP in student relations, Antonita Petkova (VP Industry Relations), and Rosa Enciso, whose title is not described. Their parters include: UCF office of Research and Commercialization, UCF Venture Lab, UCF Tech Transfer Office, and The Indus Entrepeneurs. Their mission/vision statement is: A technology has great impact on society when its consumption reaches critical mass in form of products and services. Such products and services offer great value to the end users. A large number of such high impact technologies have been researched and developed at University research labs before being incubated into commercial products/companies. Vmware and Google are great examples of such products/companies. These companies tend to be co founded by students or faculty members and remain in the vicinity of the university thereby boosting the local economy. They generate thousands of job opportunities for students and faculty members. According to a BankBoston report in 1997, MIT Graduates have spun off around 4000 companies with 1,100,000 jobs and 232 billion in Sales in `94. The report also states that if you consider MIT graduates and faculty members as an independent nation the revenues produced by companies would /make that nation the 24th largest economy in the world. As you can see

research and technology commercialization is a high impact process. The success of this process depends heavily on the motivation level of students and faculty members to embrace entrepreneurial pursuits. This is where the Innovation club enters the scene. The club aims to foster the spirit of entrepreneurship amongst UCF students and faculty members. The club`s primary objective is to motivate students and faculty members to commercialize their research/technology, by either licensing it or starting new companies based on it. In addition to motivation we provide resources or help people discover resources in and around UCF. It is our firm belief that, a single successful startup company originating from UCF will inspire current and future generations of students and faculty entrepreneurs. We are essentially in search of that "One" company. Unfortunately, they have not updated their website in a while, even though they are called the Innovation Club, so more research will be need to be done to figure out exactly what this club is all about.1

http://innovate.eecs.ucf.edu/