xFoundry@UMD Cofounder and Executive Director Amir Ansari (right), discusses the entrepreneurial initiative with UMD Chief Innovation Officer Dean Chang at the event on Friday.
In the program’s first course, cohorts will learn about the mindset of entrepreneurship, including team building, product development and collaboration. During the second course, students will form multidisciplinary teams of three to 12 to develop a business plan, a product strategy and a product pitch. They will work with instructors and mentors the following semester to develop and test their prototypes and start selling their solutions.
The student teams will face off against other UMD students as they develop their products at the annual Xperience competition. The event will award the winning team up to $2 million in funding and support from a group of seasoned executives as part of a newly formed venture. Upon graduating, the winning team members will become co-founders working on the venture’s product team, complete with a salary and equity stake. The program is a key initiative of xFoundry@UMD, a new campus initiative that fosters innovation, collaboration and entrepreneurship across disciplines at UMD, which launched out of the E.A. Fernandez IDEA Factory.
An engineer, serial entrepreneur and inventor with 70-plus patents,
Ansari was the title sponsor of the 2004 Ansari XPRIZE that awarded $10
million to the creators of the first reusable manned commercial
spacecraft (which went on to become the basis for Virgin Galactic).
He said he was struck by “the willingness of the community—every
department, every dean, every school—to come together and help us get
this message on the board. There’s an organic passion to make something
like this happen at this university.”
At the Xplore Summit, three new topics were introduced as
possibilities for the 2026 competition: mental health care for young
adults, artificial intelligence in the workplace and chronic health care
management for seniors. After presentations on all three subjects, the
audience voted via cell phone poll, and mental health emerged as the
winner.
“Launching Xplore is going to take the students who are going to
participate in this program on a journey that’s going to be enriching,
impactful and meaningful,” said Pines. “If you monetize it—fantastic.
But if you change the world and solve a real problem, I will be
grateful.”
