In the News

...Perhaps most importantly, the new Innovation Hub will provide significant opportunities for local industry and community members to engage meaningfully with students both as mentors and partners. These authentic relationships between students and industry won’t be peripheral to the student’s experience in the Innovation Hub, they’ll be central to its design, which expands on the success of the district’s partnerships with the business community. We already have entrepreneurship education programs that are central to our career and technical education programs and its Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center. These, in many ways, are the predecessor to the Innovation Hub.  Read more in SmartBrief.

One of Mundelein High School's Incubatoredu program startups, "Safe Sip," recently moved on as a finalist in the INCubatoredu National competition. Safe Sip, a drink-spiking detection product, is one of the top five Incubator startups in the country competing for this national honor. The Safe Sip startup was created by five senior girls at Mundelein High School. 

At this very moment, women across the United States are sitting on million-dollar ideas, like a product that fills a niche or a service that solves a unique challenge. And increasingly, women are turning those ideas into entrepreneurship opportunities. Women accounted for 49% of business startups in 2021, a 28% jump from two years earlier. 

Toward the end of the 2020-21 school year, I developed a plan. Come June, I’d walk out of The Colony High School near Lewisville, Texas, leaving behind a 14-year career in education, then return to corporate America. It wasn’t so much the stress of COVID-19 and remote instruction that did me in, but the monotony. I found myself teaching the same courses, serving on the same committees, feeling the same anxieties — year after year after year. Plus I realized I was becoming more flustered when the least little thing didn’t go as planned in my career education and training classes. I wanted my lessons to be perfect. I wanted to be perfect...

This fall, thousands of students at 196 high schools nationwide -- and even four high schools in Australia -- will start their own companies as part of a business incubator class launched nine years ago in Barrington.

NORTH FOND DU LAC (NBC 26)  — What started out as an INCubatoredu class project is now a massive business success, exceeding all expectations. Commah, a line of air fresheners, car diffusers, and essential oils is now sold online and at several local salons and businesses, and will soon have a spot on the shelves of Festival Foods.

Jimmy McDermott’s plans for pursuing consulting while in college changed only moments after his graduation from high school. Thirty minutes after he received his diploma, McDermott, BC ’21, answered a phone call from his superintendent about building a community service tracking app, which he promptly accepted.  

The Lakota West team – MatchedUp - is among five high school groups nationwide invited to travel to Chicago later this month to compete in the “INCubatoredu National Pitch” for thousands of dollars in start-up funding.