Welcome Message from the 2022 IEEE Entrepreneurship Chair
Wishing you all a happy and safe 2022 year!
As I continue my entrepreneurship journey, I have the privilege of being this year’s IEEE Entrepreneurship Chair. In following Ken Stauffer’s amazing work over the past two years, I have big shoes to fill. He and his predecessors have paved a great trajectory for the 2022 steering committee and I to follow. We will continue to build from their successes with the Powered by the IEEE Program, Demystifying Video Series, IEEE Entrepreneurship’s Founder Office Hours Program, Entrepreneurship workshops, entrepreneurial content for IEEE conferences, IEEE Entrepreneurship Stars, annual IEEE Entrepreneurship Impact Award, and ILN educational courses. If you have not had a chance to access these resources, you should do so, as they are invaluable in helping your company grow.
Joanne Wong
IEEE Entrepreneurship looks to provide additional resources and activities to help you as a tech entrepreneur, to continuously drive innovation locally and globally. As always, your suggestions are most welcome. Please reach out to us if you would like to volunteer or shoot us a line as to what resources and/or activities you would like to have as an entrepreneur/aspiring entrepreneur.
The 2022 steering committee, IEEE Entrepreneurship staff, and our multitude of volunteers (note – we are always looking for more) aim to increase our entrepreneurial ecosystem. Supporting entrepreneurs is the cornerstone of IEEE Entrepreneurship; they cannot be an entity upon themselves. To further this support, we are bringing in investors and corporate innovators as other key players to our ecosystem. Additionally, we are in the process of creating a woman investors council and a corporate innovators council, for they along with entrepreneurs will guide us in developing our resources and activities to connect tech entrepreneurs in an engineering driven innovation network.
In our expansion of our service offerings, we have created three new focus groups – women entrepreneurs, tech transfer (university commercialization), and deep tech start-ups. From the 2021 IEEE Women in Entrepreneurship Survey, we found out that the majority (94%) of respondents are interested in joining a support network of women in entrepreneurship. Consequently, we are using slack technology to build a virtual, global network for women to support each other. This network will also allow them to meet up locally, if they so choose.
In our continuous support of IEEE members, the tech transfer focus group is looking at building and resourcing content for IEEE conferences and ILN educational material. The IEEE academic community is filled with innovators. Perhaps, some of you would like to explore or have already planned to commercialize your research and/or patents. IEEE Entrepreneurship is there to help you in connecting with the right resources, in making an informed decision, and perhaps, in starting you on an entrepreneurial journey today or in the future.
We are also looking at how to best support deep tech start-ups. Deep tech start-up entrepreneurs have greater challenges than a tech start-up who can build his/her company with cloud services and programmers. The need to build hardware, how best to source that hardware, and how to face head on manufacturing and supply chain issues are some of those challenges. Finding these manufacturers and sharing that information with you is another one of our goals for 2022. If you have manufacturing contacts that you are willing to share with the community, please let us know. We and deep tech start-ups entrepreneurs would find this information invaluable. The more information we share, the further innovation will advance, and this will help start-ups continue to grow.
Thank you for your support of IEEE Entrepreneurship. We look forward to your continued support in 2022. Your comments and volunteerism are most welcome. Please connect with us.
All the best,
Joanne Wong
2022 Chair IEEE Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneur & Investor
