Grant aims to inject additional funds into the Georgia Tech startup initiative
Today, CREATE-X at Georgia Tech announced that The Marcus Foundation has granted $2.1 million to fund the initiative. The grant will provide program funding for the next three years to instill entrepreneurial confidence in Georgia Tech’s students across campus.
“The generous grant from The Marcus Foundation will enable us to scale CREATE-X and provide more resources to student, faculty and alumni program participants who wish to attain entrepreneurial confidence,” said Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, director and co-founder of CREATE-X and Wayne J. Holman chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. “Our eventual goal is to have 100 percent of the study body participating in the program, and The Marcus Foundation grant plays an integral part in getting us there.”
CREATE-X at Georgia Tech is a visionary enterprise aimed at systematically nurturing entrepreneurial confidence as one of the signature attributes of Georgia Tech graduates. The broader goal of this initiative is to provide the knowledge, skills, abilities and experiences that will give Georgia Tech graduates the confidence to actively create their own future.
“We support CREATE-X because it fosters an important entrepreneurial spirit and has proven to be a highly effective program,” said Marcus A. Ruzek, senior program director for The Marcus Foundation. “The Foundation wants Atlanta and the state of Georgia to be an even stronger economic hub for startup companies and helping CREATE-X is a great place to start.”
“We believe that an entrepreneurial mindset is a way of thinking – not only how to approach challenges, but how to fail and learn from them,” said Steve McLaughlin, dean and Southern Company chair of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering and co-founder of CREATE-X. “CREATE-X instills a set of attitudes, skills and behaviors that students need to succeed academically, personally and professionally. With this grant from The Marcus Foundation, we can focus on building a scalable, long term program model that gives our students the resources needed to create impactful startups.”
About CREATE-X at Georgia Tech
CREATE-X is a faculty-led, student-focused initiative to instill entrepreneurial confidence in Georgia Tech’s students. The broader goal of CREATE-X is to provide the knowledge, skills, abilities and experiences that will give Georgia Tech graduates the confidence to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and create their own future. Learn more at create-x.gatech.edu.
About The Marcus Foundation
The Marcus Foundation is the private philanthropic foundation of Bernie Marcus. Bernie Marcus is a co-founder of The Home Depot. Since his retirement from the company in 2001, he has been a philanthropist and Chairman of The Marcus Foundation. Bernie is a patriot and staunch supporter of American military, veterans, and their families. The Marcus Foundation focuses on five areas: children, Jewish causes, medical research, free enterprise, and community.
About Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering
Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering offers the resources of a major technological university and a location in the heart of cosmopolitan Atlanta. The College is the largest of the Institute’s six colleges, enrolling more than 60 percent of the students at Georgia Tech and about half of all tenured and tenure-track faculty at the Institute. U.S. News and World Report ranks the College in the top four of engineering programs in the country. The College offers more than 50 different degree programs at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels through its main Atlanta campus and satellite campuses around the world. As a leader in engineering education, the College graduates the largest number of women and minority engineers in the country.