Director's Welcome Message
It is my great pleasure and honor to serve as the new Director of the Ozmen Center for Entrepreneurship. Our Center’s vision is to “help develop entrepreneurial capacities and foster the creation of ideas and new enterprise among students and faculty of the University of Nevada, Reno and members of the Northern Nevada community.”
We are offering a variety of entrepreneurship classes as part of our academic programs. Entrepreneurship is the third most selected minor among business students. Our widely popular Sontag Entrepreneurship Competition adds significantly to the entrepreneurial ecosystem by helping student entrepreneurs develop their business ideas. This competition includes a single prize of $50,000 given to the winning team. In the most recent competition, we had 42 student applicants representing 21 majors in six different colleges of the university. We also started a new program called LaunchNevada to prepare students for the Sontag Entrepreneurship Competition.
We have organized a number of other events recently, including the International Women’s Entrepreneurship Symposium, which was a virtual event that brought together more than 40 speakers and close to 1,000 attendees from 50 countries around the world. We launched the Nevada Global Business and Economics Lab (NVGLOBE-L) in Fall 2020. As part of this new lab, we have students and faculty conduct policy related research on entrepreneurship through a Global Entrepreneurship and Public Policy Working Group. We are working with the International Division of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) and other international partners for our global entrepreneurship initiatives. We also disseminate research and other scholarly work in the Center through a Distinguished Lecture Series, two blog series on entrepreneurship and international business, and research symposia.
I look forward to working with stakeholders in our university, local community and international partner universities to facilitate a broad range of entrepreneurship activities and programs. Please contact us if you have any questions or suggestions about our programs. We would be delighted to hear from you.
With best regards,
Mehmet S. Tosun, PhD
Director of Ozmen Center for Entrepreneurship
and International Business Programs
Professor of Economics
The College of Business
