STARKVILLE — Garrison Walker, a senior at Mississippi State University, has housed his startup business, Hush Puppy, inside the Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach since 2020.
Since locating there, Walker has even been hired as a student assistant, helping several startups through research and launches. Though, he admits it becomes a little cramped when everyone is busy working.
“When you have a lot of bodies in there, it can feel like you’re losing some real estate, but we have seen that as a good problem whenever we didn’t have enough wiggle room to move around,” Walker said.
The MSU E-Center, established in 2016, is doubling its space to 4,000 square feet in McCool Hall with a renovation project that began in late May. The $1.5 million expansion will add at least three workspaces, three offices, a larger conference room and a new one-on-one meeting room for student and faculty startups, Director Eric Hill told The Dispatch.
The project is expected to conclude in December.
“The E-Center has run out of space,” Hill said. “With over 100 startups in various stages of launch … entrepreneurs need more space to grow. The second motivation is to gain space to showcase what entrepreneurs at MSU are doing. It’s to encourage folks to say maybe I can do this too.”
Hill also said the E-Center will add a museum, which will honor past startups that have launched successful businesses.
The E-Center houses more than 100 student startup ideas per year, Hill said. Of that, more than 50 successful startups have come out of the program, valued at more than $35 million combined, according to the center’s website.
The MSU Entrepreneurship program was founded inside McCain Hall in 2002 before moving to McCool in 2015. In 2016, MSU established the E-Center and moved it into its current location to create a startup incubator space.
Hill said the space will also be used by startup coaches and faculty who want to meet and discuss ideas with students at the E-Center.
“The main focus, of course, is helping current and aspiring campus entrepreneurs and those great ideas originate at all disciplines and edges of the university,” Hill said. “The nuance of this expansion is that it’s not only helping the student, but it’s also providing support for faculty shepherding student innovators and positioning us to help them with what we do best: Advising on strategy, execution and helping the venture find capital to launch.”
Walker said the new space will allow for increased privacy for the startups, which is good to have when multiple students are in the same room working on separate projects.
“It’s awesome to have our open and very talkative space, and you can get lost in conversation with people in a good way with your idea,” Walker said. “Sometimes it is important to have the option to hunker down and get your head in the work, and get in the grind and focus on what you’re doing. I think that is a pretty important aspect.”
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