Q&A with RISE Executive Director Iris Hammel
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Pushing the needle on entrepreneurial education is what Iris Hammel, executive director of Regional Innovation & Startup Education (RISE), describes as her life’s work. Deeply passionate about practical entrepreneurship training, Hammel also serves as senior vice president with the Garatoni-Smith Family Foundation.
During the 2024 Global Entrepreneurship Week, RISE will host Spark Fest, an opportunity for students to share the beginning stages of ideas they’re working on and for alumni to come back and share their business progress on Nov. 21.
With RISE’s 10-year anniversary coming up in November, the organization has had significant success raising entrepreneurs across the state and increasing talent retention. Hammel spoke with Inside INdiana Business on the organization’s work over the past decade and what’s next.
This article has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Let’s start with a bit about your background. How did you come to do the work that you do?
I have a non-linear path into education. I worked in business and industry right out of college, worked for an incredible company called Pulte Homes. At the time, my division was in Forbes top 100 best companies to work for. And one of the things that formed me as a young professional was the investment they made in mentorship, training and professional development. They really poured into us in pretty impactful ways. That was out in Colorado but I wanted to be back in the Midwest. My family’s in Wisconsin, so I moved back and got married. I worked in some corporate jobs but just wasn’t feeling fulfilled at all. So I went back and got my teaching license.
While I was getting my teaching license, I was also teaching psychology courses at the Wisconsin Technical College System. That was also formative. That system had really strong business advisory boards and they said to me, “We know you’re teaching Intro to Psychology but these diesel mechanics need time management and anger management training, training on how to manage their energy and communication styles in the office. That’s what we really want you to focus on.” For me, I’ve always felt in school, if the work wasn’t meaningful and couldn’t be applied, what’s the point of doing it? And so that was another formative experience for me, to be encouraged and empowered to teach what was meaningful, not just textbook knowledge.
After that, I got a teaching job in a very traditional high school and it was very painful. Again, back to non-meaningful, non-real, non-progressive. I did that for one year and almost went back for my master’s in psychology to do the stuff I was doing at the technical college system full time. At the last minute, I checked the Wisconsin teaching jobs board and there was an opportunity to start an entrepreneurial middle school that combined my love of psychology, sales, marketing and entrepreneurship.
I grew up on a fourth-gen dairy farm and I think farmers are the most entrepreneurial people on the planet. They’re always solving problems with resources they don’t have and I really loved that aspect of my childhood. I was the gopher, the problem solver on the barnyard, running around trying to help everybody. I got the job and started an entrepreneurial middle school and it was really progressive. It was 100% mastery-based learning. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has publicly denounced the seat time and credit hours as a measure of mastery for students. That is hugely impactful and changes the way we get to think about education. I started the mastery-based middle school with entrepreneurship at the heart of everything we did in 2009. It was a really incredible experience and I’m still connected to quite a few of those families and students today. We had middle school kids solving real problems, starting real companies and doing work in the community as part of their learning journey.
So how did you come to be in the South Bend-Elkhart Region?
In my third year of starting that school, my husband and I started our own company called TeachMe3D which teaches kids how to use 3D modeling software and gets them certified. We planned on a soft launch, for our close teacher friends and colleagues and it just took off. So one of us had to basically not renew our contract and run that business. Since I had the business background and had been on the back end of the website and the business development, it made the most sense for me to do that. My husband has an engineering background and develops all of our content.
It was the launch of the company that actually brought us to Indiana. I sent out probably 2,500 emails to schools through Project Lead the Way and one of the schools here in South Bend called me out of the blue one day and said they were looking for somebody like Alex, my husband. We drove down here, had no idea that Notre Dame was in South Bend, didn’t know anything about the area but we drove down. Within a month, we made the decision to leave Wisconsin and come down here. I was running our business full time and was not looking to get back into working for anybody else, but Larry Garatoni, who started the schools my husband was at, heard about my background with entrepreneurship and said he’d really like to start something with entrepreneurship. Larry and I started RISE 10 years ago.
We followed our nose and honestly our heart. To be able to create impact in the education space is rare because of the bureaucracy and red tape. So this was an opportunity for both my husband and I to do big things.
That’s amazing. I love that story, thank you for sharing it. So let’s talk about the different programs that RISE currently offers. What gaps did you see and how do the programs address them?
The landscape was wildly different for entrepreneurship education 10 years ago. At the time, the state of Indiana had Business 101, as entrepreneurship and kids had to take business classes before they could even take an entrepreneurship class, which was a travesty to me because that’s not where businesses get started. They get started out of engineering classes, the media arts, the creatives, the people that have a skill or a talent that they want to learn how to monetize. That’s where entrepreneurship should be, across everything, not siloed.
Larry and I started a high school program because we really wanted to expose students to the career field of being an entrepreneur. The economic development implications of startups is incredible and if you want to raise the per capita income and increase economic development in any region, you must have a vibrant, healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem. We really didn’t have much of anything happening to foster that especially at the high school level, so I was really heavily involved that first year in starting our high school program. We work with every single school in the county. The students come to us, they get out of their schools for the first block of their day and they’re with us for 90 minutes, Monday through Friday. We start at 7:30 a.m. which is early but if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to do hard things. So that’s a little bit by design. They get high school credit and we worked out a dual-college credit arrangement with Ivy Tech which revealed another problem in the state systems.
What was the problem?
The dual credit syllabus that we were required to teach was different from the high school content that we were required to teach and none of it taught startup. So as an entrepreneur, and somebody who had started an entrepreneurial middle school, I had five years under my belt of lived experience. That led us on a campaign to get alignment in the state, how could we get easy and full access? At the time, Ball State had recently gotten a $2 million grant from the IEDC to work on improving entrepreneurship activity in the state, so I partnered with them to help lead the Innovate Teachers Conference, which turned into the Innovate WithIN Pitch Competition.
That was the beginning stages of removing the prereqs so that kids had easy, clear access to entrepreneurship. I had to do a lot of long meetings with the office of career and technical education at the state level to help them understand that entrepreneurship is not business 101. Yes, once a company is established, of course, you’re going to need that business stuff but in those preliminary stages, there’s so much that has to happen, muscles that the students need to build in terms of being agile, vulnerable, being willing to fail, failing fast, how to work with mentors etc. There’s just so many skills that a kid needs that if you follow a textbook, they’re never going to build those skills because it wouldn’t be applied.
How does RISE measure the success of its programs?
Very quickly, that very first year, our cohort had incredible students and the success stories started immediately. A student had a full ride to Marion University but she dropped it to stay local, to keep running her business. We had kids that were planning to go to IU in Bloomington, decide to stay local because they had started a company and they had a network of 60 to 100 prominent leaders that had supported them with their businesses and they wanted to keep doing that. Larry and I quickly saw talent retention was an immediate outcome of our style of learning, where it’s immersed in the community. We started looking at how we could create courses at the college and community level because at the time, again, there really wasn’t much of anything happening. The stuff that was happening was definitely geared towards more high potential startups, typically based on intellectual property, research or stuff coming off of Notre Dame’s campus but that’s not the path most entrepreneurs go.
We worked with all of the higher-ed institutions in our region and launched our college/community programming in the second year of running our high school program. The same thing happened, students started companies and they stayed local. Fast forward, 10 years later, I was just at a Women in Business event with the IEDC here locally and we had Laquisha Jackson with Soulful Kitchen, a RISE alumni who’s just crushing it. We had two of our current students, a board member and several of our staff there, so four degrees of RISE. The social capital that gets built when that starts to happen is the organic fabric of building strong ecosystems. That’s really the unique, special aspect of our work, forming places where young talent can dock into that ecosystem in safe ways, start real companies with really good access to advice, mentorship, and resources in the community.
What other programs does RISE offer?
We’ve got a program called Revenue Lab at the college/community level, for students or entrepreneurs to get unstuck. Students can come and get access to experts, mentors and a group of people willing to brainstorm with them and help them get whatever it is that they need. A lot has happened in 10 years.
We helped launch the Garatoni School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Ivy Tech, a startup engine now available at 10 campuses. Within our first three years, we generated over $1.5 million in revenue for them in increasing their dual credit by 700%. We also simultaneously started up a high school teacher training program and trained people from over 90 high schools across the state. We’ve been focused on helping impact entrepreneurial activity in the state. We started local and still run our own programs locally. They are our R&D labs. Anytime we want to try something new or test something, our facilitators here test it before we roll it out to our partners and teachers across the state. So it’s exciting.
Next year, we are launching our very first RISE Hub in Marshall County. It’ll be our first rural-based program. We’re just thrilled about that because we’ve hit every demographic with our teacher training in high schools but this is really an opportunity to bring all of our work into a more rural community and act as a catalyst for activity and growth on Main Street again.
Hammel speaks about some of the programs RISE has launched over the last decade.
Can you talk more about the college/community program at RISE?
Last year in our college/community cohort, our youngest student was 18 and our oldest was 64 and the magic that happens between people was amazing. The 64 year old was mentoring the young person on life and the richness of their conversations was incredible. But then the young person would help the older gentleman on how to use the new tools. He was building a slide deck and was struggling with the technology. So we work with anyone that wants to do the real work of starting a company. We’re not here to do time wasting things with individuals. Especially in the college/community space, we really want to help people understand how they can launch and get into revenue. Our eight-week Idea to Revenue program gets students into revenue where they previously had no go-to market strategy. That’s pretty powerful. That they can start a company up, get some stability under their feet and see a viable path and future in this career field of entrepreneurship.
And how does RISE think about entrepreneurial activity versus getting a higher education?
The pandemic brought a reckoning of sorts to higher-ed in a good way, in terms of needing to prepare students for life after college. They need career skills, work-based and applied learning opportunities. Some of our most successful alumni started their companies when they were in college because of the time that they had. When you get a job and you’re in the grind of the real world, that’s a harder time to start a company. You have a lot more responsibility on your shoulders, so I think it melds wonderfully with the college experience. It fits most colleges that we work with and looking at their strategic plans, all of them have some type of community outreach for plugging their students into the local community. Entrepreneurship gives them a chance to really truly dig in and do impactful work, whether that’s social entrepreneurship, nonprofit work or service/learning projects.
If you look at the Latin word for entrepreneur, it means ‘to start’ and that’s really what it’s about, building something that doesn’t exist. In entrepreneurship, you get to practice every discipline, there’s communication, there’s strategy, there’s logistics, there’s sales, there’s finance. Every aspect of what can be taught in a classroom space can be taught in the real world, live in the community. The learning that happens builds the student’s muscles to be effective post-graduation. They know how to think on their feet, how to adapt, how to be resourceful, those things just simply can’t get built in a classroom. The real world pressure of performance and delivery can’t be replicated if it’s not real.
How has being involved with IDEA Week influenced the student experience at RISE?
We’ve been part of IDEA week since day one, we have a wonderful relationship with the IDEA Center at Notre Dame. Larry and I both sit on the Startup Board in our region, which he started nine years ago. We’ve always had our major event during IDEA Week and we’re just so grateful for that partnership. In the early days of IDEA week, it was just local students who participated because we hadn’t expanded across the state. Now we’re able to bring students to see world class speakers for free and immerse themselves in the largest entrepreneurial conference in the state. It brings such a diverse mix of entrepreneurs and our partnership with Notre Dame is a big piece of that.
This year, IDEA Week will be happening the week after Easter and RISE Fest is going to be on Thursday, April 24, after the lunchtime keynote speaker and carry through into the early evening and end with some type of celebration. It’s where our students are open for business, think of it as a public market completely run by students, alumni and all of our partner schools from across the state that bring students up. So it’s an awesome opportunity for students to get really great feedback and do more discovery work on the problem they’re solving and what customers are willing to pay for their product. It’s just such a wonderful culmination of the year where people can see what our students have been up to.
As the region grows as a hub for innovation, what future collaborations would you like to see, either locally or across the state?
They’re already happening. With Notre Dame building an innovation hub downtown, which we are probably going to be co-locating down there with them, pushing more into the community so we can serve more people. From the beginning, RISE has always intentionally positioned itself at Notre Dame, so that young people coming to Notre Dame felt like this is a place for me.
When I moved here 10 years ago, there was this notion of a ‘Great Wall of China’ around the campus, where people didn’t leave the Notre Dame bubble and community members didn’t feel welcome. And we’ve always intentionally set out to change that mentality. We want young people coming to Notre Dame to feel like they’re welcome here.
I’m excited to strengthen our tech stack and tools that we use so that those could be deployed across the state. My dream is to be 100% open source so that anybody could use them for free in the state of Indiana. That’s the goal and what we’re really excited about.