Our Mission is to create and share expert and academic entrepreneurship knowledge and resources that enhance outcomes for our students – as learners, as graduates, as entrepreneurial thinkers, and as entrepreneurial doers. In practice, this means our primary fundraising efforts will always emphasize student outcomes, particularly around new venture development.
We develop the Entrepreneurial Mindset, which is about so much more than just founders and founding processes. Having an Entrepreneurial Mindset means that one embraces – philosophically, emotionally, and intellectually – the notion that adaptable, flexible thinking is an essential skill; the notion that one must be willing to assess and take on reasonable amounts of risk, in a variety of organizational settings; the notion that one must grow comfortable with making decisions in environments where surprises can and do occur, where structure might not always be present, and where complete data are often unavailable; and the notion that one must be attentive, always, to new opportunities.
At the start of this year, Monica Dean joined the Greif Center as our new Managing Director. Monica comes to us with extensive experience in entrepreneurship center leadership, serving most recently as Director of the Jill Ker Conway Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at Smith College and, before that, Administrative Director of the Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College, City University of New York. In these roles, Monica built robust and award-winning programming portfolios encompassing workshops, idea-to-launch pipeline programs, competitions, and more – sometimes within the school itself, often with high profile institutional and corporate partners.
Prior to her time at Smith and Baruch, Monica served as a Senior Vice President at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, where her responsibilities included creation and oversight of the National Business School Network. She has also worked in management consulting, as an Associate at Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Monica is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business (MBA) and Howard University (BS in civil engineering).
