Lingnan launches new platform to nurture students’ entrepreneurship with liberal arts characteristics

As a comprehensive and concerted effort to nurture an entrepreneurial culture on campus, the University launched the “Lingnan Entrepreneurship Initiative” (LEI) at a ceremony held on 11 April.

 

LEI is a collaborative platform set up to offer education and service opportunities for students, teachers and community partners to further address the community needs with a sustainable development mindset and entrepreneurial spirit.  It also aims at fostering a culture of innovation for addressing social, business and humanitarian challenges locally and globally.

 

In his opening remarks at the ceremony, President Leonard K Cheng said innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) are an excellent fit with Lingnan’s liberal arts education because it aims to produce graduates who are open to new ideas, curious about important phenomena and their root causes, conversant with multiple perspectives, and innovative in offering new solutions. “Our students, with I&E mindset and attitudes, will surely be better equipped to make contributions and create value for society and mankind.”

 

Initiatives under the LEI include:

• developing more credit-bearing courses with innovation and entrepreneurial elements to broaden our students’ entrepreneurial skills upon graduation;
• expanding Lingnan’s Stanford Teaching and Learning Studio (TLS) alumni network to bring Design Thinking Studios from Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford to Asia. The Stanford TLS alumni network will apply design thinking with local community partners to address global grand challenges and offer Design Thinking workshops for local schools and communities;
• providing students and teachers with opportunities to compete and exchange ideas with other universities globally by organising different innovation and entrepreneurship competitions, workshops and activities; and
• launching international internship programmes so that students can work as interns in start-up companies overseas.

 

LEI also encourages students to put their innovative ideas into practice by founding their own businesses.  The competitive Entrepreneurial Knowledge Transfer Fund was established earlier which awards students’ outstanding projects with a start-up fund for two years, with possible extension if the projects’ innovative ideas can be developed into sustainable business with meaningful outcomes to the community and the world.