Q&A with Modupe Adeoye, IUSB Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center director
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A new center on Indiana University South Bend’s campus aims to give students, regardless of their major, the resources to start a successful business.
The university announced in September that Modupe Adeoye will serve as the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center’s inaugural director, which was made possible through a $2 million gift from the Judd Leighton family. The center is operating remotely and through Adeoye’s office until a physical space is completed in spring 2025.
Adeoye has an extensive educational and business background when it comes to entrepreneurship and technology—two fields she believes are intimately intertwined.
She completed the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Leadership in Business in 2019 at the University of Notre Dame. There, she received a master’s degree in ESTEEM, standing for engineering, science and technology entrepreneurship. She completed her bachelor’s degree in computer science with an economics minor at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria.
While in Nigeria, she founded and was the managing director of iStarter Hub, which introduces, educates and inspires girls and young women to go into business and technology. Her efforts led to girls building their confidence and learning technology skills equipping them to better run their own businesses or head to college for further technical education.
After the center launched this semester, Inside INdiana Business spoke with Adeoye over email and in an interview about the center, its programs, its future and what her experience will bring to students.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Tell me about yourself and your work.
It’s my sixth month on the job, and meeting new people from the community has been great. The entrepreneurial spirit has built up in the last couple of years and coming on board to do that with everyone else, without replicating what people have already done but working together to achieve more, especially in the school community with our college students. I realized very early that working collaboratively with everyone else would make my portfolio much easier to deliver.
I worked in the Education Technology and nonprofit space for about a decade in Lagos, Nigeria. I have a penchant for helping young people solve problems they have come to identify in their community by leveraging Technology. In the last two years, I moved to South Bend, Indiana, where I attended the University of Notre Dame for my graduate degree in Engineering, science, and Technology Entrepreneurship. After this, I got a job at IUSB as the Director of Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
The people in the community have been tremendously supportive, with a lot of amazing work going on in entrepreneurship. For the next year, I am working with my team to inspire the entrepreneurship spirit at IUSB, working with people in the community and leveraging the resources at IUSB. My work is built on three main pillars: Connection, Inspiration, and Engagement—inspiring the students to become problem solvers/solution providers [and] connect them to available resources and help them sustain those engagements. This is the starting point of our mission. When they think about entrepreneurship, it is not just about starting a business or making profits; it is about problem-solving. Presently, they focus on academics, doing everything to get good grades, graduate, and get jobs. The center provides opportunities that widen their horizon to see the values they can create from their community.
What benefits and opportunities will the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center bring to students to break them out of that classroom mindset?
We would have in-person mentorship programs where the students get paired with mentors they can relate to. They also have opportunities for job shadowing, internships, and the possibility of getting a job immediately after school. We don’t want students waiting around with the hope of getting jobs or getting their businesses started when they leave school. We want to prepare them for the marketplace, building the skillsets they need in the industry through their engagements and connections while they were students working as interns or job shadowing.
The Entrepreneurship Student Ambassadors (ESA) Program was launched last month, and we have received several applications. It’s a peer-to-peer startup program where students are the coaches, helping other students like themselves become young entrepreneurs. The first choice of ambassadors is people interested in solving problems they have come to identify or who already have entrepreneurship backgrounds, leadership skill sets, communication skills, and building skills based on what they’ve done in the community—maybe as a student club president or interns in the community. It’s a peer-to-peer opportunity to become entrepreneurs, so it’s not faculty or professor-led.
There would be networking events where student entrepreneurs meet older entrepreneurs from the community they look up to and can learn from.
We are also putting together the Entrepreneurship Certificate program with EnFocus Inc. The certificate program is not another course students must offer to get a grade. It’s designed as a practical program for entrepreneurs, no matter their discipline or entrepreneurial acumen. It is open to both undergrad and graduate students. There will be about five workshops in the certificate program; you need three workshops with a Capstone to earn the certificate. While taking just any of the workshops earns you a badge. It is self-paced. It’s still in the development phase.
There is a K-12 launchpad program in the pipeline. We would be working with high school students to prepare them for their entrepreneurial journey, whether they are going to college or not. It is an opportunity for them to see the resources available on campus, which may inspire them to want to pursue Entrepreneurship alongside an advanced degree — or go straight into the entrepreneurship space with access to needed resources in the school community. They would have gotten the needed skills and access to technology to prepare them for that world.
The center was announced last year. How has the reception been so far?
Students want to see the physical space for the center and have it running already. So, I have had more questions about “When are we having the Center?” This is not a drawback because more of the work is in building the students’ inspiration and passion for entrepreneurship. And we got that momentum building with the Entrepreneurship Student Ambassadors program that launched last month. And for the next year, we will keep working with our students to be inspired by the various programs that do not require a physical space.
We had 10 applications within the first two weeks when the ambassador’s program launched. These students with entrepreneurial spirit want to support other students in becoming entrepreneurs; this validation shows that students want to play active parts in entrepreneurship. And we are here to support this drive.
The energy is picking up. Students are coming to my office to ask questions: What’s next? What are the expectations? I get emails from people in the community and IUSB alumni asking, “What would you want us to do to support your work?” As I’ve said, it’s the planning phase, but believe me when I say a lot of work is happening. We need to keep building towards achieving our goal
Anyone regardless of major can join and take advantage of the center’s resources. Why is it important to make this center a collective space for students across campus?
The center breaks down the barriers created when students need to converge as just course mates. It provides unlimited possibilities for students from different disciplines to cross-pollinate their ideas. The center provides a safe space for the students to start conversations about solving identified problems. They will ask cogent questions around “What are the issues? Who are we solving this problem for? What are the metrics to measure success rate? What value should be put on this solution?”
This group of young and vibrant solution providers is united in their goal of preferring solutions and making profits in the long run. Their discipline or course of study does not limit their entrepreneurial spirit; the center would support their drive with the needed resources while they bring to the fore their intellectual insight to create new inventions.
You previously created a startup to motivate women and girls to go into business and tech. Tell me about yourself and what students will get out of working with you?
I worked in the educational technology space in Nigeria, specifically on projects related to girls and women’s empowerment through the iStarter Hub and Girls Creativity Hub Initiatives, where I helped young women have the desire to use technology to build their businesses. Over time, women have been known to shy away from technology and rather do the heavy lifting of doing business and pulling their societies together, being the providers and having little to show for it. With technology, it became a level playing ground for everybody, and women could achieve much more. Over the years, I helped these young women leverage available technologies, introducing them to tools that they could use to become more productive and better contributors to society.
For instance, I ran a girl’s summer camp for four consecutive years, introducing them to technology and basic computer use. I showed them, “Oh, this is how you use these tools to create content and all of that.” And you see girls move from not knowing how to use the mouse or the keyboard to trying to navigate the computer environment in their first week. By the third week, these young girls would already be doing photography, robotics programming, etc. Many of these girls went on to university and became programmers or have a discipline in STEM.
Older women in open markets were shown how to carry out their transactions efficiently using mobile applications over their phones without exchanging cash. For these women, those were “wow” moments where they said, “Is it even possible not to collect cash?” and being able to confirm their payments in real-time. And this was about a decade ago when Nigeria’s cashless society was quite recent. Some women would rather only sell their wares when they’re being paid in cash, so this help knew knowledge helped them to do more business.
Entrepreneurship is about enlightening people about new possibilities when they leverage technology. It makes entrepreneurial people more productive. So, I am here to create that enlightenment and help our students connect to the available resources in their community.
I’ve come to understand that if everyone is doing their own thing, we build silos. There’s so much technology around, but they need to communicate. So, in working with me, my students will build connections that give them access to the existing resources, leveraging them to be successful in their businesses.
Connecting where I’m coming from to where I am right now is exciting because I am still creating access for young people to become productive daily. I like what I’m doing. It’s relatable. Finally, I want my students to create solutions people are willing to put their money into, or what is the essence of building something nobody wants? That’s the only way technology makes sense to me. This encapsulates my portfolio – helping young people leverage technologies that help them solve problems people are willing to invest money into.
What does the future look like for the center?
For the center, we want a safe space where young people can work to ensure that the ideas, they have in their heads are doable. For a long time, in my first few years in the development space, the one phrase that kept me going was, “Modupe, is it doable?” And every time, my response returned as “Yes, it is doable,” even though I was clueless about how to get started. In the same light, I want to give every young person who walks into the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center an opportunity and walk them through the process of becoming not just a solution provider but an entrepreneur. That is what I also want to give to the young people.
When you walk into this center, I want to give you the courage to implement and help you see that the solution you are considering is the solution you should be working on early. Make the best decision as to what solution(s) would solve the problem because sometimes your ideas might differ from the real solution – but we are providing you a safe space to iterate with your team as startup entrepreneurs.
The overall goal here is to have a safe space where young people can have the solutions for the problems that they think they want to solve.