The Gordon Institute recently announced that Elaine Chen will be the new director of the Tufts Entrepreneurship Center (TEC) and will assume the role of Cummings family professor of the practice in entrepreneurship. Chen previously served as a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.
Prior to joining the Tufts community, Chen founded ConceptSpring, a consulting company that provides entrepreneurial training and advises different organizations to promote growth, according to its website. She was also the vice president of various different companies, and focused primarily on engineering and product management.
Kevin Oye, executive director of the Gordon Institute, led the search committee for a new TEC director.
He recognized Chen's extensive experience and problem-solving skills.
“Elaine is a classic entrepreneur: she starts by talking to people, identifies the problems to be solved, and takes a rapid iterative and experimental approach to creating and deploying new solutions,” Oye wrote in an email to the Daily.
He emphasized Chen’s potential to expand entrepreneurship on campus and connect with different community stakeholders.
“With her warm personality, she’ll be a visible, accessible, and inspiring leader across the Tufts community, building partnerships to bring the entrepreneurial mindset to all parts of the university,” Oye said.
Chen echoed Oye's sentiments and indicated that she would like to work with many students, including those pursuing startups, graduate education in medicine or law or careers in the public sector.
“I am energized by the potential to build on this foundation to bring the entrepreneurial mindset and skillset to students with diverse interests,” she wrote in an email to the Daily.
Chen also said she will advance the entrepreneurship program's impact across a wide range of sectors.
Oye explained that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will serve as both an opportunity and a challenge for aspiring entrepreneurs.
“Entrepreneurs see challenges as opportunities,” he said. “The pandemic may have put a damper on our traditional campus approach, but it creates an opportunity for all of us to explore new ways to engage with each other, new ways to build community and inspire entrepreneurism to solve our world’s problems.”
Chen shared Oye’s optimism and emphasized that the pandemic is putting the entrepreneurial spirit to the test.
“Some people think being entrepreneurial means being persistent and never giving up. This is half of the puzzle,” Chen said. “The other half is the ability to be flexible and adaptable in the face of crises.”
Jack Derby, who formerly served as the director of the TEC and is currently a professor of the practice at Tufts, underlined the importance of increasing the presence of the entrepreneurship program.
“Equally important to that mission was moving it across all of the university’s schools: Let’s pay attention to [the School of] Arts and Sciences, the veterinary school, the dental school,” Derby said. “[The Center's] mission was to take entrepreneurship to a higher level and to move it through all of the university.”
Derby indicated that entrepreneurship is the most popular minor in the School of Arts and Sciences and that the TEC has received more students than ever before in the last two years.
He also explained that the increased number of entrepreneurship minors follows a rebranding of the TEC in 2018.
Besides serving as the new director of the TEC, Chen has received the title of Cummings family professor of the practice in entrepreneurship. This professorship was created in 1998 by William S. and Joyce Cummings to support entrepreneurship programming at Tufts, according to a previous announcement from the School of Engineering.
In addition to her work in innovation, leadership and education, Chen has written for the HuffPost, Forbes and Fortune magazine, among others. Chen is also the author of “Bringing a Hardware Product to Market: Navigating the Wild Ride from Concept to Mass Production” (2015).
The TEC is hosting a series of virtual events every Wednesday, as part of its Jumbo Cafés programming. These events are designed to connect students with faculty, alumni and others working businesses or startups.
