SCALEUP program lands Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation grant to help minority businesses grow

The Sustainable Cultivation and Advancement of Local Enterprises for Underserved Populations (SCALEUP) program, an initiative within the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Texas State University designed to research the factors restraining minority-owned business growth and develop remedies, has received the 2022 Knowledge Challenge grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

The three-year, $400,000 grant will enable SCALEUP to expand its efforts at helping minority-owned businesses achieve greater success. Data from the U. S. Department of Commerce show that the gap between what minority and nonminority businesses earn in sales continues to increase, and if minority businesses were able to grow at the same rate as their nonminority counterparts, more than $6 trillion would be added to the national economy and over 20 million new jobs created.

“The growth of minority-owned businesses is critical to the future health of our local, state and national economies,” said Josh Daspit, an associate professor of management in the McCoy College of Business and director of SCALEUP. “The SCALEUP program is honored to be selected by the Kauffman Foundation as a recipient of this prestigious grant. This support will allow us to expand our research efforts and, ultimately, develop tools that reach more businesses and create more impactful change.”

SCALEUP’s goal is to better understand and serve the growth-related business challenges of all underserved populations. In particular, the initial focus of the program is to understand these issues within the Hispanic-owned business community. The SCALEUP program launched in Fall 2021 with seed funding from Frost and support from the McCoy College of Business. SCALEUP has also established partnerships with the Texas Association of Mexican American Chambers of Commerce (TAMACC), which is the state’s leading representative of Hispanic businesses, and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, which supports public and school libraries statewide. In collaboration with these and other partners, the Kauffman Foundation’s grant will enable SCALEUP to better understand the inter-related, systemic challenges that Hispanic-owned businesses face when growing and will support the development of tools to help these business owners overcome such obstacles.

Josh Daspit, an associate professor of management in the McCoy College of Business and director of SCALEUP

“Conducting research with relevance is important. We are in a position to create impactful, systemic change. With the recently announced support of the Kauffman Foundation, we are better able to advance research and create resources that help minority-owned businesses grow,” Daspit said.  

The Knowledge Challenge is a biannual program that invites proposals for research activities aimed at improving our basic understanding of entrepreneurs and the levers, tools and methods that can advance entrepreneurship in the United States. The Knowledge Challenge is open to proposers conducting research in universities and academic institutions, laboratories, companies, nonprofit organizations, and as individuals. The goal of the Knowledge Challenge is to produce tangible insights for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship program and policy design, ecosystem leaders, and researchers.

For more information on the SCALEUP program, visit https://scaleup.txst.edu/.

For more information on the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, visit https://innovation.txst.edu/.