A Founder’s Legacy

The Smith School’s longtime hub for helping students launch their startups has a new name: The Dingman-Lamone Center for Entrepreneurship.

The name change pays homage to the center’s founder and first dean of the business school, Rudolph P. Lamone (1931-2023)—thanks to a generous $3.8 million gift from his widow, Linda Lamone ’70.

“Rudy,” as he was affectionately known, served as dean from 1973 to 1992 and had a far-reaching impact. He was the soul of the center and one of the greatest champions of entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland and beyond.

“The idea of the gift is to perpetuate Rudy’s love of the Smith School and of the center for entrepreneurship,” says Linda, who served as Maryland State Election Administrator for nearly 30 years and who is a UMD accounting graduate. “He saw the enthusiasm students brought to fostering entrepreneurship and that’s what excited him about it.”

“Rudy was a remarkable innovator who brought entrepreneurship to the forefront of business education, and made it possible for Smith students to experience venture creation,” said Smith Dean Prabhudev Konana. “He leaves a legacy of mentorship and creativity that will continue to influence the school for years to come.”

The gift will allow Smith to bring the excellence of the Dingman-Lamone Center for Entrepreneurship to a wider audience, continue to foster student entrepreneurs on campus and in the local Maryland community, and expand to support alumni entrepreneurs.

With offerings that include mentoring, networking, startup incubators, pitch competitions, funding opportunities, classes and an entrepreneurship minor, the center is a cornerstone of the University of Maryland’s strong entrepreneurial ecosystem. It’s a major contributor to Maryland’s ranking among the very top in the nation for entrepreneurship. In November, the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine ranked the university No. 7 across all institutions, No. 5 among public universities, and No. 1 in the mid-Atlantic — its 10th straight year in the top 10.

Maryland’s strength in entrepreneurship all began with Rudy.

Leaving a Legacy

Lamone spent his entire professional academic career at the University of Maryland. When the university created the business school in 1972, Lamone was appointed as its first dean after being nominated by fellow faculty. “As he grew into the deanship, he became more and more interested in expanding what the school was doing,” recalls Linda. “One of his pet projects was entrepreneurship.”

Rudy pioneered the idea of an entrepreneurship center based at a business school and found the right partner to launch one in 1986 with alumnus Michael Dingman, a self-made international investor and businessman. With a promise the center would touch the lives of countless UMD students and also fuel business development in the state of Maryland, Dingman quickly signed on.

“Rudy worked very closely with Michael Dingman to create the center,” says Linda. “He spent a lot of time over the years nurturing it, making sure the resources and the people were available to those students who had ideas and wanted to do something with them.”

“It was well before ‘entrepreneurship’ was this phenomenon and very visionary on Rudy and Michael Dingman’s part,” says Michael Hoffmeyer, the current managing director of the Dingman-Lamone Center.

Lamone was also a champion for entrepreneurship beyond Maryland and co-founded what is today the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, which includes more than 300 academic centers worldwide.

“There aren’t very many people in the university entrepreneurship scene that don’t know who Rudy is,” says Hoffmeyer. “He is widely considered to be a grandfather of university entrepreneurship.”

Even after he retired, Lamone came to Van Munching Hall so frequently that he had an office where he continued to meet with students, call alumni and fundraise.

“Rudy was the lifeblood of the center for so many years,” says Brent Goldfarb, the center’s academic director and the Dean’s Professor of Entrepreneurship. “He worked tirelessly until right before he passed, trying to use whatever resources and connections he had to better the center and the school.”

“The DNA of the center has always been Rudy, so to know that in perpetuity, his name will be associated with every entrepreneur that participates in the Dingman-Lamone Center is momentous and well-deserved,” says Elana Fine ’97, who was managing director from 2012 to 2018 and now serves on its board.

Linda says Rudy would be so humbled about the name change of his beloved center. The couple decided together to give the gift, and supporting the center was very important to him. “I’m hoping they will make good use of it and it goes to help foster his dream.”

Entrepreneurship for Everyone

In its nearly 40 years in operation, the Dingman-Lamone Center has helped countless students learn how to start and grow businesses. It is an incubator, a funder, and a source of mentors and teachers. Currently, the center runs more than a dozen programs and courses for student enterprise development. The center emphasizes inclusive entrepreneurship in all its programs.

“The reality is that any of us can be an entrepreneur, in so many different industries,” says Tsega Tadesse, director of venture development.

Tadesse teaches an inclusive entrepreneurship course. Students can also hear from underrepresented entrepreneurs in the center’s Elevate! Diverse Founders panel series. The center also now tracks data on diverse founders and makes sure all judging panels are objective, equitable and “everybody is getting a fair shot,” says Tadesse.

“We’re highlighting diverse pathways and the stories of women, people of color and underrepresented groups,” she says. “Our inclusive entrepreneurship efforts really try to excite and empower students to be a part of it.”

Smith’s entrepreneurship classes also pull students from all backgrounds into the pipeline.

“Classes get students thinking about ideas and empower them to believe they can be entrepreneurs,” says Hoffmeyer.

Goldfarb says there are several entrepreneurship classes in Smith’s MBA program, and undergraduates can take venture creation classes or do the entrepreneurship and innovation minor with five classes.

“The minor takes students through a core entrepreneurship curriculum that pairs well with most of the other majors on campus,” says Goldfarb. “We have students taking part from engineering, computer science, art, sociology—the gamut. This diversity of capabilities and viewpoints is exactly what you need in an entrepreneurial environment.”

An Entrepreneur’s Journey Through Dingman-Lamone

Many students who get a taste of entrepreneurship in class go on to participate in other Dingman-Lamone programs—showcasing their fledgling businesses in Terp Marketplace, getting advice from successful entrepreneurs at weekly sessions, or participating in the center’s annual venture competition.

The spring Pitch Dingman Competition is supported by the center’s board chair David Quattrone, MBA ’05, co-founder and chief technology officer of Cvent. Quattrone serves as a judge and he and his wife fund the top Robyn and David Quattrone Tech Track. Nearly 90% of competition winners since 2016 are still currently operating their businesses.

Many competition participants subsequently take part in the Dingman-Lamone Center’s summer Terp Startup Accelerator, which marked its 10th year in 2024. The intense, eight-week program helps entrepreneurs hone their business plans and build their ventures, culminating in a final Demo Day pitch and startup showcase. The center then selects some companies to become Terp Startup Fellows—the center’s “top-tier program with our highest level of white glove support and non-equity funding,” says Hoffmeyer. “Those are the companies that often go on to be self-sustainable, raise capital, or otherwise be success stories for the center.”

Korion Health is a recent example. The company is creating an electronic stethoscope and user interface to let patients gather their own heart and lung health data. In September, Korion won the prestigious $1 million Hult Prize in London, beating out nearly 10,000 entrepreneurs worldwide with startups solving social issues.

Korion co-founder Akshaya Anand ’19, M.P.S. ’23 studied biology, computer science and machine learning. While earning her master’s degree, an intriguing hackathon project led to her starting the company with Anna Li, a University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University M.D./Ph.D. student.

Neither founder knew much about business, so Anand turned to the Dingman-Lamone Center for help. She first participated in Terp Startup Accelerator, then the Terp Startup Fellows program.

“That was the pivotal moment for me—when I saw myself as someone who could run a business full-time, and not just do this on the side,” she says. “We probably wouldn’t be where we are today without Terp Startup Accelerator giving me the confidence and resources to make the jump. We’ve been supported by so many great people who were willing to put in time and effort into helping us move forward.”

In the Community

The Dingman-Lamone Center is also a bridge to entrepreneurs and investors in the region. Last year, it piloted a program for local high school students with Junior Achievement of Greater Washington. Called Launchpad, the immersive 12-week after-school program paired UMD students with high school students to teach them entrepreneurial skills.

The center also runs one of the most active angel investor programs in the Mid-Atlantic. Since its inception, the Dingman Center Angels network has invested more than $31.4 million in 214 transactions. Last year alone, members invested in eight new companies and approximately $4.6 million in new and follow-on investments.

Evan Lutz ’14, CEO and founder of Hungry Harvest, has pitched the group multiple times and received investments. Lutz’s food distribution company has a mission to fight food waste and reduce food insecurity. In the past 10 years, he has grown it to a 60-person organization, based in Landover, Md., and reduced about 50 million pounds of food from going to waste. “We’ve served hundreds of thousands of people across seven different states.”

Lutz started the company as a Smith student, relying on advice and feedback from successful entrepreneurs during weekly sessions.

“That resource as a student was invaluable to me,” says Lutz. “I was there probably every week my senior year while I was working on the concept for Hungry Harvest.”

It’s one of the reasons he feels so compelled to stay involved with the Smith School now, returning often to mentor students, serve as a Pitch competition judge, and to speak in classes.

“When I was a student, I idolized the successful entrepreneurs that came to speak at Smith,” says Lutz, whose first investment came from a guest speaker he met in a class. “I knew by interacting with those folks, by learning as much as I could, by getting their contact information, by really just making as big and as comprehensive a network I could with successful entrepreneurs that came out of the University of Maryland—that would be my guiding light to starting a business.”

Lutz is one of many alumni who are very involved with the Dingman-Lamone Center. “I like to ensure that our alumni have really meaningful engagement and match them with the right program so they want to continue to be involved with the center,” says Hoffmeyer.

What’s Next

Hoffmeyer says the Dingman-Lamone Center wants to bring even more alumni back to the center—not just to help student entrepreneurs, but to get help for their own businesses.

“The most exciting expansion of the vision for the center is broadening to support alumni entrepreneurs, especially those who have recently graduated in the last 10 years,” he says.

Last spring, the center successfully piloted a track for alumni to compete in its signature Pitch competition. Hoffmeyer hopes to create more opportunities for alumni to get services to build their businesses. Some could be getting help and also mentoring students, he says.

“The goal is to provide another level of alumni engagement and build on the whole philosophy of Terps Helping Terps.”

The Lamone gift will help the center create more programs to do so.

It shouldn’t be difficult to get more alumni coming back, says Fine. She says the center has always had a strong culture of connectivity that pulls people back, year after year, as mentors, speakers, judges and board members. It’s what pulled her back in.

A big part of that was because of Lamone himself, she says. “Rudy created a warmth and the culture of coming back. He was part of the Dingman Center for life. People felt that pull to it.”

Fine says renaming the Dingman-Lamone Center for Entrepreneurship is going to inject a new energy into the current programming, while taking pause to plot the “new” center’s future.

“It’s an opportunity to be entrepreneurial about teaching entrepreneurship and say ‘OK, what comes next?’”