Overview

Established in 1999, the Entrepreneurship Center (EC) of HKUST is a center designed for entrepreneurs to support innovation and entrepreneurship on the HKUST campus. It also serves as a unique platform to facilitate knowledge transfer between the University and society. EC runs different types of entrepreneurial activities, in addition to seminars, and provides seed funds to foster an entrepreneurial campus. Through encouragement and direct engagement, EC cultivates a risk-taking value-creation mindset in the students, alumni, professors, and support staff of HKUST. The Center is committed to nurturing entrepreneurs, helping them bring their business ideas to applications in real-world settings. It strives to nurture next-generation entrepreneurs whose companies make commercial, social or cultural impacts for the economic and social development of Hong Kong and beyond. It continuously keeps abreast of new trends to expand business opportunities, enhance corporate competitiveness and promote the overall development of Hong Kong.

Vision

  1. Incubator of the most vibrant startups community in tertiary institutions in HKSAR

  2. The most influential accelerator in tertiary institutions that incubates and accelerates startups with the forefront of potentials to drive possibilities for the overall success in entrepreneurship development

  3. The seedbed for HKUST homegrown unicorns

Service & Training

EC provides reliable and resourceful support to entrepreneurs through mentorship program (mentorHUB), various large and small entrepreneurial competitions, and different forms of funding. Entrepreneurs under the support of EC have the opportunity to participate in different annual entrepreneurial competitions, such as One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition and hackUST & hardUST, to present their business plans to an international panel of investors and decision makers, establishing themselves in HKUST and Hong Kong. EC also offers entrepreneurs a number of funding schemes, including Entrepreneurship Acceleration Fund and Student Start-up Grants, to enhance and realise their entrepreneurship development.

Expand

Jointly organized by the HKUST Entrepreneurship Center (EC) and the Technology Transfer Center (TTC), the Technopreneurship (TECH-Ship) Program aims at bringing together faculty technologies with student entrepreneurship development by providing a platform that introduces faculty research outcomes.

It promotes the development of science and technology entrepreneurship through market planning, joint publicity projects and social activities, so as to facilitate passionate students to form partnerships with faculty members for technopreneurship development and deepen the public's understanding of the research and entrepreneurial achievements, as well as the contributions of the HKUST. EC also launched the “Greater Bay Area Youth Entrepreneurship Fund Program” to support Hong Kong youths from the HKUST who are interested in starting businesses in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). EC actively complements the country's implementation of the GBA initiative, hoping to help local youths contribute to the entrepreneurship development in the GBA through resource integration.

Mission

  • Empowers HKUST members (students, alumni, and faculty members) with open and welcoming approaches for their entrepreneurship development
  • Connects entrepreneurial minds with adequate services and resources to facilitate their growth and success in entrepreneurship developments
  • Fulfills the university’s vision in promoting entrepreneurship development and achieving success with strategic efforts
     

Our program is called Dream Builder, which supports the community to make big dreams and build them. The program equips interested parties from knowledge acquisition, ideation, prototyping to commercialization, as follows:

  1. Knowledge (Broaden and deepen skillsets): This is to equip the community with practical knowledge and tools for entrepreneurial pursuit.  Through working with academic units and credit-bearing courses, we organize various seminar series inviting prominent practitioners (entrepreneurs, investors, alumni, etc.) to share their experiences.  We also organize workshops on current and advanced topics of interest, where the community can gain hands-on learning experience.

  2. Ideation (Inspire and grow ideas): The goal is to inspire, grow and substantiate ideas.  We run various competitions where students can be exposed to different ideas, pitch theirs, receive feedback, and connect with the like-minded.  We organize visits to maker spaces, startups, conferences and exhibitions so that the participants can be engaged and exposed to different market sectors so as to develop empathy toward them. We also manage the HKUST BASE, a vibrant co-working space to promote entrepreneurship and a mixer to connect all HKUST entrepreneurial members.

  3. Execution (Create value and impacts): The goal is to help our serious players to build their products and penetrate markets.  We manage accelerator funds and a co-working space to help them jumpstart their products.  We offer them advising and mentorship so that they can find pathways from ideas to impacts.  To help their startups grow, we also organize activities so that their ventures can be exposed to the market, customers and investors.

We work closely with a student group, the BASE team, to promote entrepreneurship activities to our students.  Through these, we provide systematic cultivation of future entrepreneurs, create a self-sustaining entrepreneurial eco-system, and stimulate technological innovation and knowledge transfer.  We look forward to working with you in fostering an entrepreneurial culture in the campus, and seeing you in our events.

Check out our latest issue of Entrepreneurs@HKUST (30th Anniversary Special Issue) here!