A Q&A with Danny Briere

Inaugural director of Trinity’s new Center for Entrepreneurship

Danny Briere, who came to Trinity College last year as director of the new Center for Entrepreneurship, brings more than three decades of experience as an inventor and entrepreneur, starting multiple successful firms—including TeleChoice, which focuses on leading-edge, high-impact technologies—and serving as a consultant to more than 200 start-ups.

Briere earned a B.A. and M.B.A. from Duke University, where he majored in public policy and economics. He served on the board of the Duke University Fuqua School of Business’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship initiative for a decade, and his experiences span multiple industries, including telecom, internet technology, alternative energy, health and medical, social networking, education tech, and youth-oriented nonprofits. He recently took the time to answer questions from The Trinity Reporter.

What attracted you to Trinity College? I was between start-ups, and the timing hit me perfectly as I was considering what I wanted to do next in my career. I’ve always been passionate about helping expose our K–12 youth to invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and this position continued that theme into the college environment. But two big factors really convinced me that the Center for Entrepreneurship was a great idea. The first was the top-down commitment. This was not about a faculty member trying to sell an idea “uphill” but rather a true swarm of support starting in the alumni base and the Board of Trustees and coming down into the College. I knew right away that this would make a big impact at Trinity because the topmost decisionmakers at the College felt that way. The second was the willingness to “think big”—this is important to me. If we are going to do this, let’s do it right and make an impact on the Trinity community, on Hartford, and beyond. This center can be a pathway to all sorts of new opportunities, partnerships, projects, and perspectives. The entrepreneurship community is a very giving and pay-it-forward community. There’s so much that can be accomplished, and quickly. It’s a great opportunity for everyone.

How does a Center for Entrepreneurship fit in a liberal arts college such as Trinity? This center exists alongside Trinity’s other centers of excellence, amplifying our distinctiveness as a liberal arts college in a city. Our centers are vibrant hubs that bring together multiple constituents and advance Trinity’s mission and goals. The Center for Entrepreneurship continues Trinity’s evolution of bringing innovative and entrepreneurial mindsets to students as they seek to apply their liberal arts learning to solve problems in the world around us. The response from Trinity’s faculty and staff has been awesome. We have an interdisciplinary advisory board from all across campus that is ensuring that everything we do aligns with the overarching Trinity College liberal arts tradition. They’ve been a joy to work with.

What are your goals for the center? How will students benefit? We have two major goals. First, we want to establish innovative and entrepreneurial mindsets in students early in their Trinity career. Thinking outside the box is a learned skill, and it makes sense to expose students to this way of thinking as early as possible so they can use those skills in whatever major they pursue. You will see us launch J-Term courses, student internships, innovation and entrepreneurship certificates, an Innovation Fellowship, a student invention competition, and other start-up activities to excite students toward a predisposition to be innovative and entrepreneurial in life. Second, we want to create a support system of services, programs, and experiences to help those students who specifically want to become entrepreneurs. This includes incubation and acceleration programs, immersive engagement opportunities, study-away experiences, mentor programs, grants and funding opportunities, and other resources to support an entrepreneur’s journey. Taken together, these two axes of approach provide a continuum of innovation and entrepreneurship that builds a robust student body that is liberal arts educated and innovatively and entrepreneurially inclined.

How does the center align with the Trinity Plus curriculum? Trinity has a long history of enhancing its traditional liberal arts core with interdisciplinary and applied programs such as human rights, neuroscience, and engineering. The creation of the Center for Entrepreneurship follows that model and forms a key element of the College’s Trinity Plus curriculum, which makes explicit and integral to every student experience our unique marriage of the traditional liberal arts with applied experiences.

What role do alumni and parents play in the center? Alumni and parents anchor the Center for Entrepreneurship. They are our mentors, judges, supporters, volunteers, funders, sponsors, and donors. Alumni have tremendous experience and networks that can support student coursework and projects. Alumni also bring outside perspective—particularly decades of work experience—that complements the passion of our students. Alumni will bring not only their expertise to bear but also their own entrepreneurial bent. The center will have formal programs to engage alumni with student teams to explore and to grow entrepreneurial ideas and potential products, services, and, ultimately, companies. It’s especially exciting to see parents getting involved as their students enjoy their own Trinity experience. It’s a shared relationship that builds a stronger Trinity bond for life.

What have you considered your immediate priorities? The top priority was to not lose a year in getting started. I began in mid-August when students were starting to arrive on campus, and I did not want to have to wait a year to trial and pilot our initial programs. We had three objectives:

1. Engage with students where they are. We have reached out to and sponsored the Entrepreneurship Club, the Investment Fund, and other student organizations to find out their goals and to explore synchronicities. In just our first semester, we have held joint events, taken field trips, and launched internship programs.
2. Pilot our intended first-year invention convention-style program. Working with the Kelter Scholars, we are trialing a first-semester, first-year innovative mindset experience where students are guided to look at the world around them, to select a problem they’d like to solve, and to then work through the possible solutions toward a final prototyped solution. These inventions were set to be exhibited at an event early in the spring. In fall 2023, all first-year students can opt into this experience, alone or in teams. We expect this to become an annual, fun rite of passage for Trinity students.
3. Pilot our intended senior capstone sponsored-projects program. Working with the Computer Science Department under Associate Professor of Computer Science Ewa Syta, we are trialing a program where outside companies fund departments for the faculty time and resources so that students may work interactively with sponsor development teams to explore specific problems and seek solutions. This year, four students are working with two sponsors to research and advance projects in the computer science field. This fall, we hope to provide students with a broad choice among alumni-sponsored projects to complete their Trinity major coursework. This program will bring new sources of revenue to the College while building long-term relationships with future employers and internship sponsors.

What do you see as your biggest challenges, and how do you plan to face them? The biggest challenge is easy to foresee: progression from a vision to implementation. Trinity is an institution with many different facets, and innovation and entrepreneurship cross many thresholds. The center itself does not seek credit-bearing coursework; that is the domain of the many academic departments on campus. As we seek to implement our programs, it is imperative that we collaborate with and respect the culture of each department we are working with to bring the co-curricular activities to fruition. This will take a lot of meetings, a lot of listening and learning, and then cooperation to meet mutual goals together. The Center for Entrepreneurship is a campuswide effort, and we all win with more innovative and entrepreneurially thinking students.

Read more on the recent Summit Innovation Challenge.