Innovation Hub / Partner Spotlight

Middlebury College’s Elizabeth Hackett Robinson ‘84 Innovation Hub traces its roots back to 2007, when then-president Ronald Liebowitz launched a special project to spark student creativity and innovation on campus. The “Hub”, as it is colloquially known, has come a long way since then. Last year, it interacted with nearly 1400 students, about half of the college’s student population. In this Q&A, Director Heather Neuwirth Lovejoy details the Hub’s evolution, some of its most successful ‘exits’, and where the organization is headed.

Blaise: Hi Heather! Thanks so much for your time. We have a lot to get to! For starters, could you give me a history of the Hub’s founding?

Heather: Sure! Several alumni and staff noticed the student body was increasingly focused on academic specialization and their GPA. There needed to be opportunities outside of the classroom for students to pursue intellectual risk-taking, outside-of-the-box thinking, and creativity. In 2007, the Hub started as the Project on Creativity and Innovation, and it was a special project under the President [Ronald Liebowitz]. The first programs were the Old Stone Mill, our creativity incubator; our MiddChallenge summer grant funding, then called Stonehenge; and TEDx Middlebury.

Blaise: What were the main goals of the Hub? What gap was it trying to fill?

Heather: These programs were built [since] students were avoiding failure, which is usually what spurs the best things that happen to you. Probably half of the students who do grants with us every year now come back and say, ‘It was impossible to work for myself; I have no interest in being my own boss.’ And what a great learning outcome to spend a summer doing that instead of trying to bootstrap and be an entrepreneur after college. So there’s individual learning that happens, but then also some really deep skill building that helps with academics and with your eventual career. We’re trying to get students comfortable with communicating, collaborating, and identifying strengths and areas of growth.

Blaise: Tell me about the team that runs the Hub.

Heather: We have five staffers right now. We also have four part-time faculty directors and affiliates who have their day jobs as professors, but do all sorts of fun experiential stuff with us.

Blaise: As someone who was once involved with the Hub, I know how much you offer – for-credit programs, funding opportunities, off-campus experiences. Does any other college program have the same breadth of offerings?

Heather: There are versions of what we do across so many campuses, but we continue to be different because one of our goals is to work with every single student across their time in college. This last school year, we worked with 1391 students in over 5000 engagements. Because of our programmatic diversity, there are entry points for every single student to plug into from the minute they get here. And then the creativity piece is really big. We are one of the few schools I know where our summer grants have an arts category –– a student could record an EP, host a dance education program, or do a project on Vermont’s history with weaving and wool. Our incubator space, unlike almost every other incubator I’ve been in, is a creativity incubator. We offer space to student businesses but also student tenants that have visual arts projects, cooking, and film projects and then we work to equip those students with resources and skills around building budgets and reporting on their projects.

Blaise: Is there a specific offering at the Hub you’d like to shout out?

Heather: I’m not going to answer with a program, but I’ll tell you a time, which is J term, Middlebury’s one-month term in January. J term is when almost all of our programs are running. There’s so much engagement as students have more time to explore things that are meaningful to them. The MiddCORE summits, the leadership panels, pitch competitions in MiddEntrepeneurs, field trips… It feels like the innovation community on campus is ablaze, and we are putting our best face on for all of campus.

Blaise: How did the connection start with VCET?

Heather: It started with Liz [Robinson], the founder of our foundational programs. I came to start working here in 2011 and there was already a connection. I will tell you that MiddEntrepreneurs used to be student-taught, more workshoppy, until VCET turned it into a serious business-building course. Through MiddEntrepreneurs, VCET is basically the foundation from which all of our full-time, self-employed entrepreneurial students launch into life post-grad. Of course, the resources at the Hub are super important to continue to bolster those students, but MiddEntrepreneurs is usually the process where entrepreneurial students gain the confidence to take their ideas to the next level.

Elizabeth Robinson (left) and Heather Neuwirth Lovejoy (right) have both played significant roles in growing Middlebury College’s innovation and entrepreneurship offerings. (Credit Todd Balfour)

Blaise: Tell me about some of the Hub’s most successful student groups and startups! Some of your notable ‘exits’ include Gnara, Skida, Illuminar Coffee Roasters, BiggaBed, and Treeline Terrains – now all incorporated companies, run by Middlebury alumni.

Heather: This list is really important for us, because it shows that we have some of the support and resources necessary for students to be entrepreneurs post-grad. But I think one of the things that’s most exciting, and part of our success measurement, is the amount of students who participated in these programs and threw away their idea or decided it wasn’t viable, or they wanted to hone in on other parts of their career, or it wasn’t going to make their lives work financially. But now, five to ten years out of these programs, they are contacting us saying, ‘I did my time in this job, and now I’m ready to roll and launch a start-up. And thanks to MiddE, or thanks to MiddCORE, I have the confidence with the business building process and the basic skill set to do this, and I’m bringing other people on board.’  Our outcomes are still surfacing years and years after students leave here.

Middlebury students celebrate winning the Start Here Challenge in September 2018 with their startup, Overeasy. From left: Elizabeth Robinson (VCET board member), Heather Lovejoy (Director of Hub), Eva Shaw (Middlebury ‘20), Meg Collins (Middlebury ’18), Izzy Hartnett (Middlebury ’21), Alex Brockelman (former Creativity and Innovation Associate for the Hub).

Blaise: As you said, a central goal of the Hub is increasing access points. How does the Hub ensure inclusivity?

Heather: You can’t learn in these spaces if you don’t feel like you belong in them. We don’t use the word entrepreneurship very often; innovation still has a lot of barriers for people. Whether it’s terminology like change-making, skill-building, or creativity, we try to use terminology that creates a big tent. Once people participate in one program, they often realize it’s less intimidating to enter the innovation spaces than they initially believed.

Blaise: One of the recent additions to the Hub has been Vermont Innovation Summer (VIS), which I participated in when I first interned at VCET in 2023. Why did you decide to found Vermont Innovation Summer (“VIS”)?

Heather: For several years, I really struggled with the outpouring of support and interest from Burlington’s innovation ecosystem in engaging with Middlebury. These were pre-Zoom days, when most students weren’t going to drive up to Burlington for internships. VCET in particular was an inspiration because they had employed several Middlebury students for summer work in the years leading up to the founding of VIS. I saw the growth happening in Burlington, in particular, with tech and innovation. And I really wanted Middlebury to stay on the radar of the people that were involved in that growth, and so the piece for me was just figuring out housing. Through some connections down here and up in Burlington, we unlocked the partnership of Champlain College housing and started to set up the cohort internship program, under the premise that they have much greater learning outcomes and success because students are living, learning, working, and playing together.

Blaise: Several years into its existence, what have been some of the notable outcomes of VIS?

Heather: Last summer, over half of the VIS students were offered part-time internship extensions or full-time employment. And almost every single student – except one – said that they would consider Burlington in the future. Now there are students circulating this idea that a summer in Burlington is time well spent, and there’s opportunity to work in different sectors. It is really cool that so many students can consider Burlington as a postgrad destination, and people are emailing me coming back to campus asking, ‘How do I live in Burlington and do an internship?’

Blaise: What goals do you have for the Hub over the next 3-5 years?

Heather: Doubling down on this investment we’ve made in Vermont-focused programming. One of the pivots that I’ve made is connecting students to Vermont’s ecosystem, because it’s easier to access our backyard. You see this real value being created and it starts to create a buzz on campus that Vermont is really cool and there’s room to grow professionally here. I think there’s some real value in seeing our neighbors and the people around us as contributing to the education here. We do field trips, now can we expand those out and build on those connections? Are there ways that we can bring more faculty in the fold to understand that what we can do is complementary to what they do? Our Oratory Now program does this beautifully already.

Blaise: OK, Heather, now I’m going to give you two sentences, and ask that you finish them. First up: A student should come to the hub if _____?

Heather: They are curious!

Blaise: A successful interaction with the student looks like ____?

Heather: They leave with the confidence to pursue and implement an idea.

 
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Learn more about the Elizabeth Hackett Robinson ‘84 Innovation Hub here. You can also find Heather on LinkedIn here.