Entrepreneurship for STEM Students: Where to Begin

Entrepreneurship for STEM students works best when it builds on what you already know how to do. If you’ve designed an experiment, debugged code or written a lab report, you’ve practiced forming a hypothesis, testing it and changing your mind when the evidence says so. That’s the heart of testing a business idea too. What most STEM students need to add is the customer side: who has the problem, and whether they’d change what they do.

This article focuses on that translation. For what entrepreneurship training covers, how to choose a program and a first practical project, see our pillar on entrepreneurship training.

What transfers, and what to add

Mapping STEM skills to entrepreneurship

Mapping STEM skills to entrepreneurship

You already practice	How it transfers	What to add
Forming and testing hypotheses	Treat each business assumption as a hypothesis	Tests that involve people, not just equipment
Careful data recording	Rigorous notes from customer interviews	Separating what people said from what you hoped they meant
Troubleshooting	Diagnosing why an idea isn't working	Willingness to change the idea, not just the method
Technical depth	Credibility and the ability to build prototypes	Explaining value in plain language for non-experts
Working in a lab team	Collaboration and shared responsibility	Working with people outside your discipline

Choose the gap that worries you most and work on it first. For most STEM students, that’s talking to potential customers, covered step by step in customer discovery for students.

Campus resources to look for

Names vary, but many universities have some of these:

• An entrepreneurship or innovation center, which may run workshops, competitions and mentoring.
• A technology transfer office, which handles inventions made at the university.
• Entrepreneurship courses, sometimes open to students from any major.
• Makerspaces and prototyping labs.
• Student clubs focused on startups or innovation.

A short visit or email to one of them is often the quickest way to learn what’s available to you.

If your idea comes from research

Ideas that come out of a lab need extra care.

1. Talk to your research adviser. The idea may build on the group’s work, and they need to know.
2. Read your institution’s policy on inventions. Many institutions have rules about who owns inventions made using their facilities, funding or staff time.
3. Contact the technology transfer office before public disclosure. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office notes that while the US allows a one-year grace period after an inventor’s public disclosure, “many other countries, however, will not grant patents in cases where public disclosure precedes the patent application filing date.” A talk, poster or paper can count as disclosure. This is general information, not legal advice.

Our pillar on entrepreneurship training also describes research-focused programs such as NSF’s I-Corps.

Balancing it with your studies

Entrepreneurship can take as much time as you give it. Agree with yourself, and with your adviser if you’re in a research group, how much time you’ll spend and when. Check any rules your institution has about outside activities, and protect your coursework and research commitments.

An exercise to start

An invented teaching example: a materials science student lists three things they’re good at in the lab: running tensile tests, writing analysis scripts and explaining results to non-specialists. Next to each, they write one group of people who might need that skill: small manufacturers checking supplier materials, for instance. That list doesn’t produce a business on its own, but it gives them three groups of people to start talking to.

Use the customer discovery interview guide when you’re ready to have those conversations.

A practical next step

Make your own version of the skills table above with three of your strongest technical skills. For each, write one group of people who might have a related problem, and choose one group to talk to first.