A Women’s Business Center will soon be housed within Syracuse University’s South Side Innovation Center due to a $750,000 award to the Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises Program in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. The grant will be utilized throughout a five year period.

The WBC, named the Women Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship Center, is one of 14 new centers awarded nationwide by the U.S. Small Business Administration and just one of 70 in the United States.

The grant was announced at a news conference Tuesday at 1 p.m. at the SSIC in front of about 150 people, including Congressman James Walsh, Chancellor Nancy Cantor and Interim Vice Chancellor Eric F. Spina, said professor Michael Morris, who aided Miyasaki with applying for the grant.

‘It’s a center where we’ll be working with women entrepreneurs and help them grow their businesses and make them more viable,’ said Melvin T. Stith, the dean of Whitman. ‘We want to improve the life expectancy of local women-owned businesses.’

Nola Miyasaki, executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Whitman, started the process of applying for the SBA grant.

She said Whitman has a strong women’s entrepreneurial program and already works with a lot of women entrepreneurs, so a WBC was the perfect fit for what is happening at the SSIC.

‘We were very fortunate to get (the center) because it was a very competitive process,’ Miyasaki said. ‘We’re very grateful that we could do this.’

Miyasaki said she and Morris received a lot of support when they requested the grant, including from the university, local political leaders, partners in the Syracuse community and women entrepreneurs.

Coupled with what she saw in people’s faces Tuesday, Miyasaki said she has no doubts that the WISE Center will be a success.

‘What was really rewarding was that so many entrepreneurs came up to me and said ‘this is such a great thing and means a lot to the community,’ ‘ Miyasaki said. ‘This center is going to attract a lot of new resources and energy. Everyone is really excited about it, and that is what really matters.’

The WISE Center will be housed within the SSIC, a business incubator that helps train local entrepreneurs to understand how to grow their own businesses, Miyasaki said. The building holds 30 businesses at a low market rent. It provides all the essentials, including a computer, phone line and Internet, to help the entrepreneurs ‘hatch’ their own businesses. Renters typically remain in the SSIC for about two to three years.

What makes SU’s SSIC and WISE Center unique is that no other university in the country has a business incubator located off campus.

‘Incubators are usually on campus and for faculty and student businesses only,’ Miyasaki said. ‘The benefit is that it’s experiential learning for the students. They get to go and do courses and projects. We may have missed one or two, but we can’t find anything like this.’

Amy Mehringer, communications manager at Whitman, said the WISE Center will not officially open until all programs that the grant money will support are formed.

Published on October 10, 2006 at 12:00 pm