The University of Georgia’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences is launching a new initiative designed to build students’ entrepreneurial confidence and to help them create successful startup companies.

Funded by a $3 million grant from The Marcus Foundation, Franklin CREATE! will establish a robust three-phase model that allows arts and sciences students to gain hands-on experience, mentorship and access to the resources needed to bring their ideas to life. The program is a collaboration between Franklin College and UGA’s Entrepreneurship Program and Innovation District and CREATE-X at Georgia Tech.

“We are tremendously excited about engaging Franklin faculty and alumni to unleash our students’ full entrepreneurial potential and to drive positive change to enhance market-driven impact,” said Anna Stenport, dean of Franklin College. “It is a critical moment to bring scientific, technological, artistic, computational and social impact advancements into the laboratory of fresh ideas that characterize startup culture. We are deeply grateful to The Marcus Foundation for their support in strengthening our students’ ability to further connect their campus experience with their career aspirations.”

By the end of the three-year pilot, Franklin College aims to create at least 20 new courses, study away opportunities and curriculum pathways. The college has set a goal of introducing more than 2,500 students to entrepreneurial processes and helping launch at least 60 startups.

Franklin CREATE! will enhance the university’s thriving entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem.

Launched in 2016, the UGA Entrepreneurship Program is a campus-wide initiative that serves more than 1,000 students each year and includes a variety of academic and experiential opportunities. An academic certificate program at both the undergraduate and graduate levels offers a comprehensive curriculum that includes training to help students become future innovators in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. The program also offers an idea accelerator program, a summer launch program, seed funding for new ventures and hosts local and national pitch contests to help build students’ real-world skills in launching their startup ventures.

The Innovation District fosters entrepreneurship and the commercialization of ideas at UGA through a comprehensive ecosystem of people, programs and facilities. The District has supported the launch of more than 200 companies and helped introduce more than 1,200 products to the marketplace built on UGA’s research. For the third consecutive year, UGA ranked No. 1 among U.S. universities for the number of commercial products brought to market by industry partners based on university research, according to an annual survey conducted by AUTM.

 “The University of Georgia has developed an incredibly strong culture of entrepreneurship and innovation among students and faculty, and Franklin CREATE! promises to take our efforts to a new level in the arts and sciences,” said Benjamin C. Ayers, the university’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. “I am excited to see this new initiative get started, and I thank The Marcus Foundation for its generous support of our students.”

Another partner in the initiative is CREATE-X, an entrepreneurship program at the Georgia Institute of Technology also supported by The Marcus Foundation. The Franklin College will adapt the CREATE-X model to its arts and sciences curricula.

“We are excited to join forces and collaborate with the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences to exchange ideas and learnings from CREATE-X that will drive student innovation and entrepreneurship across the campuses of UGA and Georgia Tech,” said Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, vice president of commercialization and chief commercialization officer at Georgia Tech. “For more than 10 years, CREATE-X has shown a proven track record of success, and we are thrilled to partner and build a shared ecosystem of support, mentorship, and cross-campus collaboration for students. By bringing together the strengths of our institutions, we’re creating a model for innovation that can empower everyone across the entire University System of Georgia to turn bold ideas into real-world impact.”

The Franklin College of Arts and Sciences is the oldest and largest college at the University of Georgia, with more than 12,000 students and more than 1,000 faculty, 40 departments and institutes, 160 academic programs and 100,000 alumni. The college generates nearly $2 billion  in economic impact for the state each year with Franklin faculty, students and alumni pushing the boundaries for exploration and commercialization in fields ranging from artificial intelligence, arts, biotech, health, music, and media, to mental health, chemistry, geology, and data science. Franklin faculty have been back-to-back winners of UGA’s Entrepreneur of the Year award representing the School of Computing (2025) and the Department of Theatre and Film (2024).