STARKVILLE, MS- Courtesy of MSU and Emily Daniels

Eric Hill, director of Mississippi State University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach, is a long-time entrepreneur who uses his position to help community members of like minds to realize their own dreams. He started out in Louisiana providing computer solutions for small businesses, and soon branched out, helping beauty pageant organizations to create and manage their voting platforms. He later obtained a degree in industrial engineering from MSU, where he continued along these lines, even producing an app called SportSnax, which allows sports fans to order concessions right from their seats in the stadium; the app is now in use at LSU, Bama, and MSU’s stadiums.

As his knowledge and reputation grew, he “I learned of a coordinator position opening to support entrepreneurship and technology transfer,” Hill said. “I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for me to help other entrepreneurs while helping test SportSnax’s feature rollout at Dudy Noble and Humphrey Coliseum on the side. The startup grew but never really did reach critical mass. In parallel, Gerald Nelson, who is basically the grandfather of MSU entrepreneurship, retired shortly after. Caring for entrepreneurship at MSU basically fell to me.”

“There’s more support now than there’s ever been for entrepreneurship,” Hill went on to say. “We impact students from across the entire campus by trying to make them millionaires and create jobs for others. That’s the goal, and there are now multiple examples of that. We don’t want students having to leave to go be part of the future. We want them to create the future here.”

Please click here for the original article: https://www.msstate.edu/our-people/2023/06/eric-hill

image credit: Megan Bean