The Riata Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Exists as the entrepreneurial catalyst for OSU students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the State of Oklahoma. We offer student competitions, experiential programs, and valuable resources to help inspire and equip future entrepreneurs.

The Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) Scholars program is a distinguished initiative developed to recognize and engage the top graduate students at OSU. The core values the program is built on are excellence, innovativeness, creativity, responsibility for change, engagement in one’s surroundings, personal integrity and strong moral character.

The School of Entrepreneurship and the Riata Center operate within a broader ecosystem that provides support to business startups and technology commercialization efforts both on and off campus.

The School of Entrepreneurship awards a number of scholarships each year and has made a long-term commitment to providing our students with the best resources for an affordable education.

The Entrepreneurship Club (E-Club) of OSU is a student organization connecting the dots between ambitious students and the resources needed to help them to materialize their entrepreneurial goals. We are dedicated to fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship on our campus creating innovative opportunities for students to connect with entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurial community.

The Entrepreneur Scholars program accelerates the development of student leaders in the School of Entrepreneurship. It is a cohort-based program that provides undergraduate entrepreneurship students the opportunity to represent the department, network with prominent alumni, meet with faculty to help shape the future of the department and act as role models for other entrepreneurship students. Applications are open once a year, usually towards the end of the spring semester.

We are one of a collection of National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps sites across the country. The program aims to train faculty, students and other researchers in innovation and entrepreneurial skills to get scientific discoveries into the marketplace. The program utilizes customer discovery to determine whether a particular technology or business idea represents a viable commercialization opportunity.

The Riata Pre-Seed fund provides up to $25,000 in early-stage funding for student ventures. The goal is to provide sufficient funding for the startup team to develop a prototype and/or conduct customer discovery to establish the venture’s initial target market. The hope is that at that point the venture will be positioned for traditional equity funding to continue to develop and launch the venture.