Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Turn your great ideas into the products and services of tomorrow

Open to all Luddy students and the broader IU community, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program helps students seize their future and do things that have never been done before.

We support aspiring innovators and entrepreneurs through a clinic, workshops, mentoring, scholarships, and workspace.

A close-up of CareBand bracelets with wearable sensors to monitor movement and daily activity.

A springboard for success

While Adam Sobol was an undergrad studying informatics, he founded CareBand, which uses wearable sensors to monitor the movement and daily activity of seniors living with dementia.

Luddy helped Adam develop the skill set to succeed with CareBand by exposing him to several forms of computing. Winning an IU entrepreneurship competition helped, too: Adam got money to turn his idea into reality and learned a lot from pitching to a group of distinguished Luddy and IU alumni.

Shoemaker Innovation Center

The Shoemaker Innovation Center is a university-wide, student-focused source of creative and effective approaches to supporting innovation and entrepreneurship at Indiana University. In addition to housing the Cheng Wu Build Clinic, which is focused on product development support, the center regularly hosts talks by experienced technology inventors and entrepreneurs as well as workshops to facilitate the development of the technical skills students need for the successful implementation of their startup concepts.

Student inventors and entrepreneurs benefit from the following resources:

Mentoring by experienced professionals
Networking and educational events
A creative, collaborative working environment
Co-working space
Shared conference rooms

Cheng Wu Build Clinic

The clinic facilitates the Luddy School's support of student startups and relationship with industry partners through the following services:

Assist student startups with system analysis, design, and implementation of a minimum viable prototype.
Develop business and technical content to enable student growth in areas related to project management, product development, and related technical areas.

The following services are provided through the clinic:

Concept Design: Assist startups in developing the engineering details of their idea, which includes working from the problem statement through design ideation and developing design alternatives, resulting in a concept design report.
Detailed Design: Work from the concept report to develop a detailed design for the system to produce a detailed design report which would enable a detailed cost and sourcing analysis.
Prototype Fabrication: Assist startups with the development of a minimum viable prototype.
Workshops: Train skills in different technical areas such as PCB development, 3D modeling and implementation, and embedded software development.

To apply for coworking space or to become a client of the clinic, write to luddysic@iu.edu.

Cheng Wu Innovation Challenge

Pitch your innovative idea for a slice of $30,000 in funding. The competition is open to all IU Bloomington students.

Learn about the Cheng Wu Innovation Challenge

Student Tingyu Li stands with her robot for the Cheng Wu Innovation Challenge.

Velocity Conference in Silicon Valley

Each year, a group of Luddy graduate students travels to Silicon Valley to learn firsthand from successful tech entrepreneurs. You pay for transportation, and donors cover the food, hotel, and logistics costs. Grad students, we’ll email you when the application for the next Velocity Conference goes live.

Learn about the Velocity Conference