The public perception of entrepreneurship is vastly misrepresentative of reality, according to one design professor.
Speaking at the Entrepreneurs Lecture Series Monday in the Talley Student Union, H. Christian Hölljes, a professor of graphic and industrial design, spoke about the need for entrepreneurship education to teach students to translate their innovations and ideas to the market more effectively.
“When entrepreneurs step up and tell you how rosy and exciting it can be, it can be all of those things, but mostly it’s hard fought and it’s tough,” Hölljes said.
Hölljes is an award-winning designer, inventor and serial entrepreneur who has pioneered and patented new products and created lucrative new markets in active learning and steganography, according to Tom Miller, senior vice provost for academic outreach and entrepreneurship.
Hölljes recently co-founded Wavvox Technology. It’s product allows silent metadata to be encoded into any audio and decoded by any smart mobile device using proprietary encoding and decoding algorithms. The technology allows second-screen applications to synchronize and extract data from TV shows, radio, public address systems and other audio sources in what is estimated to be an emerging $6 billion market, Miller said.
Concatenation, the idea of students choosing their own course of study through modules, is the future of education, Hölljes said.
“The idea of taking courses online doesn’t make any sense to me,” Hölljes said. “We are in a nascent stage of doing online learning, and if we break courses into small power chunks, articulate the network and work with Redhat and SAS, we may end up owning an infrastructure that is valuable to the rest of the world.”
Hölljes said that the Triangle needs young entrepreneurs to bring the region back into the national spotlight.
“We have to tear down barriers and invite bigger, bolder thinking,” Hölljes said. “This is what happened in Silicon Valley, people thought bigger than themselves,” Hölljes said.
Hölljes said that he predicts big changes now that Charlotte is the second largest financial center, now overtaking San Francisco.
“We need to lift UNC [Chapel Hill] up,” Hölljes said. “We have to lift Duke University up. We have some exciting things going on with these different schools that I hope we’ll make the news about,” Hölljes said.
Hölljes said that the Triangle needs to be aware that other cities are ahead of Raleigh economically, such as Austin, Texas, Seattle, New York and Boston.
Miller said the attendance was lower than years past due to the change in venues. The lecture series had previously been held in the McKimmon Center for the last 12 years and the change caused a bit of confusion among the attendees.
