California State University Dominguez Hills is Delivering Value to Students and the Community
Campus Innovation Incubator Partners with City of Carson to Help Small Businesses
At a time when the role and value of universities is being questioned, California State University Dominguez Hills (CSUDH), located in Carson, California, is proving that institutes of higher learning can deliver value.
Several years ago, the university, under the leadership of Provost Dr. Michael Spagna, established the on-campus CSUDH Innovation Incubator to foster student entrepreneurship. In 2020, Dr. Spagna hired Mr. David Ochi as the Incubator’s Executive Director. David has taken a non-traditional approach in developing the incubator’s activities.
If you visit the incubators on many campuses across the United States, you will find students creating business plans, developing products, and researching technologies with the idea of launching a traditional entrepreneurial venture. The concept behind these business ideas is that the business will be an industry game changer like Uber, Amazon, or Google.
David recognized that trying to launch industry game changers might not be the best use of the university’s resources given the high failure rate of most such ventures and saw limited value in the learning experiences of those efforts to the university’s population of students. Instead, David began developing programs that focus more on small businesses and community engagement.
One such program he developed is the City of Carson Small Business Growth Academy (CCSBGA). In this program, the university, through the Innovation Incubator, partners with the City of Carson to provide a small business training program. The program lasts ten weeks and is open to small businesses in the City of Carson. Each week the owners and/or managers of the business cohort meet on campus to learn from subject matter experts, and to learn and help each other.
During the program small businesses study various facets of business including management, leadership, innovation, human resources, advertising, marketing, branding, and finance. Some sessions focus on technology solutions such as CRM systems, artificial intelligence, and small business software. The idea is to give local small businesses extra resources to help them grow and prosper. The program is open to businesses in the Carson area with revenues up to $20 million per year, and/or one hundred employees.
At the most recent Small Business Growth Academy Showcase thirty local businesses that successfully completed the program gathered for a celebration of their success on campus in the special events room in the university’s newest building. That group included businesses in aerospace manufacturing, apparel, wood products, security services, financial planning, snack foods, logistics, trucking, travel, recycling, and dentistry.
Another great aspect of the program is that most of the participants through the program have been people of color. In recent years there has been significant interest in the subject of the wealth gap and certainly part of the wealth gap is a result of historical barriers that may have made it challenging for people of color to own businesses. It is not that complicated. If you own a business and can create value, there is a very good likelihood that you will be able to pass some or all of that value on to the next generation. Business ownership is one solution to the wealth gap and the more entrepreneurs and small business owners we have the greater chance we can shrink that gap and hopefully eliminate it.
Today many people of color are embracing the idea of owning their own business and building wealth and a family legacy to leave to the next generation. But as we know, running a business is not easy and running small businesses is very challenging. The small business owner must wear many hats. He or she is the head of marketing, production, administration, and finance, and often the owner has his or her sleeves rolled up and is loading trucks and waiting on customers just like any employee. Executives at big companies make mistakes and waste resources every day of the week that would put many small businesses out of business.
That’s why David’s program is of such value. Having owned a small business I can attest to the fact that most small businesses need help. It is challenging to understand and be competent in all the disciplines needed to operate a business successfully. While no program can guarantee the success of a small business, CCSBGA is providing the basic business knowledge that could be the difference between success or failure, or as I would prefer to think of it, the difference between survival and roaring success. Many of the businesses through the program will stay small but having met some of the graduates of the program, I am convinced some of them will build solid, lasting enterprises that will create significant value, which will employee hundreds of people and that will provide a legacy for their families.
With the program, it is not just the business community that is winning but the students are winning too. This program gives the local business community better insights and understanding of the education the university provides to its students and it also presents an opportunity for the students to assist these local businesses as volunteers, interns and even as employees. So, the students can get real life business experiences outside of the theoretical learning that takes place in the classroom. Many of the participants in the program tap into the talent of the students through internships, consulting projects, and post-graduation hiring. Digital marketing, accounting, and operations support are just some of the dozens of areas where the students have supported over fifty of the participants of the CCSBGA program.
The Innovation Incubator’s focus on teaching the mindset and skillset of innovation and entrepreneurship around small business is unorthodox but is laying the foundation for inter-generational wealth shifts in the community. Through programs such as CCSBGA and Alpha Start, a revolutionary program designed to launch student side hustle businesses during a 6-hour boot camp, the Innovation Incubator is positioning students and the community to become self-reliant and resilient in the new economy. In fact, as the Incubator’s programs scale, David believes that there is no reason that the entire graduation class can’t be free of student debt by the class of 2030 by generating the money for tuition through small entrepreneurial ventures.
In summary, CSUDH and its Innovation Incubator under the leadership of David Ochi are engaging the local small business community with the university’s student population creating value for business owners, students, and the City of Carson. What they have accomplished provides a role model for other institutes of higher learning and certainly can be applauded for a job well done.