Dartmouth Aims to 'Supercharge the Engines of Discovery'

The Magnuson Center and west end expansion are creating fertile ground for innovators.

Students check out new technology and design work created by students in the DALI Lab and the Computer Science Department at the Technigala conference hosted by DALI in March.

The entrepreneurial spirit is thriving at Dartmouth, where opportunities abound for startups, commercialization of inventions, access to experiential learning, and the cultivation of alumni, staff, and faculty networks.

The College is dedicated to fostering a new entrepreneurial ecosystem at the College, says Associate Provost for Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer Eric Fossum, the John H. Krehbiel Sr. Professor for Emerging Technologies.

This translates into opportunities across the campus, from offering faculty and researchers the opportunity to hold and develop patents on their Dartmouth research, to providing students a chance to live and learn with other undergraduates who have ideas for startups, to connecting alumni seeking a way to put venture capital to work developing new Dartmouth ideas.

“We see all entrepreneurial thinking on campus as an important value embedded in a liberal arts education. This is not a new idea, but Dartmouth is doing it in quite an integrated fashion across campus. We are a small, nimble community, and I think it’s allowing us to do a much more comprehensive and cohesive job, compared to our peer institutions,” Fossum says.

And with the west end expansion now underway to integrate Thayer School of Engineering, the Department of Computer Science, the Dartmouth Applied Learning and Innovation (DALI) Lab, and the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship, Dartmouth will soon have a central location for its new ecosystem, says Fossum.

By bringing Magnuson together with computer science and engineering, fields of study that have produced many of the patents at the College, the west end expansion will “supercharge these engines of discovery,” he says.