Celebrating the tenth anniversary of Regis University’s Innovation Center

A decade in the making, Regis’ Innovation Center is one of the unsung heroes of a holistic, career-ready Jesuit education. Ten years ago, Regis University launched the Anderson College of Business. In tandem, Regis launched the Innovation Center, designed to inspire students and faculty and foster enterprises in the local community.

Students from across each college of the university are invited to utilize the Center’s resources. From startup funding and portfolio building to the Innovation Challenge, the Center is dedicated to service for students and the community.

But why “innovation?” For Ken Sagendorf, Ph.D., the director of the Innovation Center,  the Center fully encompasses the meaning of Magis – or “the more” – which Ignatian pedagogy strives for. In the Center’s foundation, Sagendorf defined for the university what that word would mean by consulting faculty, staff, alumni and Jesuit pedagogical works. The Center’s design synthesizes education, spirituality and business practice into a curriculum that serves students’ needs for the modern workforce.

“Most educational institutions, including our own, are really focused on critical thinking. We would argue that the Innovation Center is just the beginning, and you need that part to move to systems thinking,” said Sagendorf. “We move also to self-awareness, ingenuity, love and heroism – it's taking on a very Jesuit charism to a business lens.”

The Innovation Center’s unique approach was built from its foundation. In Clarke Hall 358 sits the Gronowski Innovation Lab. The on-campus lab, intended and used as a collaborative incubator space for students, Regis faculty and staff and local businesses, was in fact designed and executed before the Center had fully taken off.

Leading first with execution has propelled the Center to excel in the services it provides. Beyond crafting the curriculum, Sagendorf explained how the Center propels students to advocate for their own educational needs.

“At the very beginning, the Center was meant to improve the co-curricular opportunities that would create a back-pressure model with the students,” said Sagendorf. “If we're really going to serve others, the ‘others’ need to be involved in what's formed and created.”

One of the ways the Innovation Center infuses this self-directed education is through the Anderson Reports. As the capstone project for Master of Business Administration students, Anderson Reports puts students into the local business community as equity analysts, covering – often for the first time – publicly traded companies headquartered in Colorado. These reports have included Farmland Partners, Inc. and Riot Blockchain, Inc.

Looking back from the end of an educational journey to the beginning, the Innovation Center impacts students before they even attend Regis. Since 2023, the Center has partnered with Arrupe Jesuit High School to provide the same mentorship and business education to students who have come from historically underserved backgrounds.

“What we're so proud of is that [these students are] taking that class at Arrupe Jesuit High School, and they're getting credits and transcripts from Regis University.” Sagendorf continued, “We’re inviting them and their families here to Regis.”

Far and above, however, the stand-out initiative of the Innovation Center is the yearly Innovation Challenge. Now also a decade old, the Innovation Challenge brings together students, alumni, faculty and the local community to design and prove a viable business solution for the modern world.

Each competitor vies for a chance at $10,000 and a physical co-working space on Regis’ campus. Regis students involved with the Innovation Center take up the mantle of organizing and executing the Challenge each year, providing tangible work experience that these students carry with them beyond graduation. In just a decade, the Innovation Challenge has already provided more than $375,000 to over 231 businesses, creating many opportunities for students, alumni and the community to exercise their business expertise.

Beginning in the fall, teams of business leaders – who are often students themselves – organize and pitch their ideas and receive expert mentorship from the Innovation Center throughout the year. Sagendorf emphasized that Regis is the only Colorado college to open this kind of opportunity to the local community.

“This is an example of how our mission works, very intentionally so,” said Sagendorf. “One of the wonderful things that I love is that not only do we invite the community in to know about Regis, but our students are getting their first jobs out of college because they're working with some of these community teams.”

The support of the Innovation Center doesn’t end once a student graduates, however. The Alumni Matrix is an organizational system of the Center that connects recent and established alumni for collaborative opportunities, including careers and mentorship. Each year, the Alumni Matrix invites graduates to network and reconnect with campus. With over 75,000 alumni in the network, alumni involved in the Innovation Center have a wealth of connections to draw from.

Over the past decade, the Innovation Center has proven its model of student-focused, Jesuit mission-based business education. Looking towards the future, the Center is on the precipice of offering more for Regis’ students. Operating on donations alone, the Innovation Center is ready to expand its reach and build upon the foundation it has created for the next venture.

“We're trying to build and operate a live business here at Regis, where you're going to have to do all the functions of a business: hustle, grow, hire people, pay people, train people, etc.” Sagendorf continued, “We want to kind of reinvigorate the co-learning and the co-teaching model, where the community becomes part of our education force, where the students are out in our community, they're helping businesses succeed and learning by doing.”

By making more hands-on opportunities available for students, the Innovation Center will be able to cycle resources back into the educational model for the next decade to come. To learn more about the Innovation Center and the Innovation Challenge, visit https://www.regis.edu/academics/colleges-and-schools/anderson/innovation-center