In October, William & Mary’s Miller Entrepreneurship Center will add a new hub (seen in this rendering) in Tribe Square.
North Carolina-based Epic Games, the maker of the massively popular video game Fortnite. Still, when he speaks to W&M
students, Rollins doesn’t start with his successes. Instead, he shows a PowerPoint presentation of the many times he says he “fell on his face” presenting new ideas, embar- rassed himself in front of other stu- dents or felt the sting of rejection. And that’s the most important
lesson Rollins says he learned from being a student in the supportive environment at W&M’s Alan B. Miller Entrepreneurship Center — not being afraid of failing. “Failure is not the end of the
world,” he explains to his audience. “It’s going to happen — in fact, it’s necessary. You just get back up, figure out what you did wrong and try it again, only this time you do it a little bit differently, a little bit bet- ter. If you can do that, you’re going to be successful.”
New president, new focus Students who want to excel
in the workforce of the coming decades, will need to learn to think and act like entrepreneurs — to take risks, fail, discover opportuni- ties, adapt, solve problems and work independently and collaboratively — which is why W&M, under the new leadership of President Kather- ine A. Rowe, has started working to embed those basic entrepreneurial skills and mindsets across the entire undergraduate and graduate stu- dent population. “Given the pace of change in
every organization, in every sector of every industry, we all need to be asking, ‘How can we as work- ers come up with a better way to do something?’” Rowe asks. “It’s a question that entrepreneurs routinely ask themselves, but it’s going to become expected of every profession [and] every employee in the future.”
www.VirginiaBusiness.com Prior to her academic career,
Rowe was an entrepreneur who co-founded and served as CEO for Luminary Digital Media, which has combined Shakespearean texts with interactive apps so readers can better engage with and understand the Bard’s works. But entrepreneurial thinking
isn’t just for those who want to start their own business ventures. The demand for employees who can be flexible and innovative is going to skyrocket, she notes, pointing to a recent forecast by the California-based think tank Institute for the Future, which predicted that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. “If those estimates are even
marginally correct, then the ability to adapt to changing technology, changing workplaces, changing practices, is going to be one of the most important success factors for
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