Florida Atlantic University alumnus John Thomerson’s journey with entrepreneurship started early in his college career, when an email inviting students to attend an entrepreneur boot camp landed in his inbox. He wondered how the boot camp could help with his business idea, so he signed up to participate.

“The boot camp covered everything I needed to know as a budding entrepreneur – from how to build out a business and create a pitch deck to having a realistic business plan,” Thomerson says.

Thomerson graduated with $56,000 in non-diluted funding for his patent-pending pet health care venture, Potty Pal, along with a broad networking base fostered by the years he spent in Florida Atlantic’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Potty Pal was inspired by his wirehaired terrier, Daisy, who suffered from hind-quarters paralysis. The Potty Pal device helps dogs with similar challenges relieve themselves.

“Everything with the entrepreneurship program exceeded my expectations,” Thomerson says. “The beautiful thing about the program is that it is interdisciplinary in nature. There’s an effort to span all areas of the university so that everyone can participate in the innovation ecosystem.”

Innovation and growth

The entrepreneurship program, housed in Florida Atlantic’s College of Business, takes a multi-pronged approach to fostering the next generation of business leaders. At its core is the Adams Center for Entrepreneurship, led by director and senior instructor Kevin Cox, Ph.D., who has been widely recognized for his efforts. In 2025, Cox received the Entrepreneurship Practice Award from the Academy of Management and the State of Florida Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year Award. In 2024, he won Best Conceptual Paper from the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship for his research on prototype development.

The program itself also is widely recognized for excellence. Florida Atlantic’s undergraduate entrepreneurship program is ranked 19th in the U.S. by the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine, and the graduate program is ranked 40th. Additionally, Florida Atlantic is ranked 8th globally for research productivity in entrepreneurship by the Texas Christian University Global University Research Productivity Rankings.

In addition to its popular boot camps, the Adams Center engages with students and the local business community through the Shrimp Tank podcast, in which staff members interview some of the brightest CEOs from around South Florida to get their insights and advice on becoming a successful entrepreneur. The center also hosts the Business Pitch Competition – where students across all majors can pitch their ideas for the chance to win seed funding for their ventures – and offers mentorship opportunities for aspiring student business creators by pairing them with experienced business professionals.

“We’re committed to upholding an ecosystem that supports student founders from the idea stage to launching the company,” Cox says. “Students can take a designated academic service-learning course and are paired up with early-stage companies to work directly with founders, making the work our students do critical for these start-ups.”

Cultivating a spirit of entrepreneurship

An entrepreneurial spirit has long been part of the foundation of Florida Atlantic. In 2013, Daniel Gropper, Ph.D., joined the university as dean of the College of Business. He saw an opportunity to build on this system.

“There was a lot of strength and potential in the College of Business with the Adams Center for Entrepreneurship and across the university in the other colleges,” Gropper says. “We needed to build up our faculty expertise on the academic side with recognized senior scholars, newer faculty and experienced business mentors to support our students and what was going on in the business community. We built upon what our predecessors had done and added to the academic reputation of the entrepreneurship programs.”

The college focused on three key areas to ensure future success:

• Recruiting leading researchers and rising stars in the field of entrepreneurship
• Emphasizing research in entrepreneurship, small businesses and family businesses
• Further development of student competitions and existing outreach programs

The Department of Management Programs offers a concentration in entrepreneurship with three core classes: an introduction to entrepreneurship; a focus on financing a business; and a consulting project in which students work directly with start-up companies. Faculty members also offer a robust academic curriculum that gives students the necessary theoretical framework.

“Good researchers make good teachers when they bring their work into the classroom and they talk about the practical applications of the theoretical work they are doing,” says Roland Kidwell, Ph.D., the Carl DeSantis Distinguished Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at Florida Atlantic. “All of this works cohesively with our student resources, the local community and research goals. We have been successful in seeing how these pieces fit together.”

A vital factor in the success of this program is how it applies to all students – not just those in the College of Business – and how professors emphasize the real-world applications that students can model in their businesses, according to William Paczkowski, Ph.D., entrepreneurship instructor in Florida Atlantic’s Department of Management Programs.

“Students in my class are learning by doing. I encourage them to enter the Business Pitch Competition to learn how to ask the right questions. Are they applying the right concepts versus regurgitating information they’ve memorized from a textbook?” Paczkowski says.

Vivian Yu, a senior in Florida Atlantic’s Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, is pursuing entrepreneurship as a minor. She heard about the program from a friend, who suggested she enter it to sharpen her business skills as a future architect.

“I knew I needed that business perspective because, as an architect, you are selling your ideas,” Yu says. “You can have an amazing product, but the venture won’t go anywhere if you don’t know how to pitch it.”

Since participating in the program, Yu was a runner-up in the Business Pitch Competition and has been able to finetune and start funding her own entrepreneurial venture, a crib made from wooden joinery that converts into other pieces of useable furniture as a child grows into adulthood.

“One thing that makes our program different is that we are encouraging everyone to have an entrepreneurial mindset across the college,” says Kidwell. “If you are in health care or finance, that may not be a management or entrepreneurial track. Still, we have the resources to teach you this mindset and how to take calculated risks that will make you more marketable to jobs.”

Impressive alumni

More than 115 new businesses have been started by participants of Florida Atlantic’s entrepreneurship program, with many gaining national recognition for their creativity and ingenuity. Thomerson’s Potty Pal has won first place in various competitions nationwide, and since 2018, seven alumni have been named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list – a who’s who of young entrepreneurs making their mark on the world.

• Jan Bednar (graduated in 2014) – founded Shipmonk, a tech-enabled fulfillment center that helps e-commerce companies ship orders internationally
• Alex Schulze (graduated in 2017) and Andrew Cooper (2017) – started 4Ocean, a sustainability brand that funds global ocean cleanups through the sale of bracelets and other products
• Hannah Herbst (graduated in 2020) – developed Beacon, a device designed to provide a stable power source to developing countries by using untapped energy from any moving body of water
• Kyle Lansing (graduated in 2020) – created StrawFish, an environmentally friendly company producing affordable, biodegradable straws made from seashells, offering an alternative to single-use plastics
• Arielle Baril (graduated in 2020) – created Rielli, a beach and swimwear brand donned by celebrities and featured in fashion magazines including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit
• Maxamillian Sherman (graduated in 2021) – founded Ballz 4 Change, an e-commerce company that retrieves golf balls from lakes, canals and rivers and resells them at a discount

“It’s been wonderful to see so many of our alumni achieve upward mobility and realize the American Dream through entrepreneurial activity,” says Gropper. “We are proud of their ingenuity, and the entrepreneurial legacy we are establishing at Florida Atlantic.”