The Innovate State Speaker Series brings both emerging and accomplished Spartans back to campus for a fireside chat-style interview. These 60-minute sessions offer the chance for guests to share their perspectives on a wide array of topics like innovation, startup life, investments, and career paths. Students get the opportunity to hear firsthand about the hard knocks of the entrepreneurship & innovation hustle to maintaining work/life balance. These are stories of success, stories of failures, and stories of uncommon will—and you do not want to miss them.

Innovate State kicks-off at 6 p.m. ET in the Entrepreneurship Lab (651 N. Shaw Ln., M025 Business Pavilion, East Lansing, MI 48824) and are free to the community. Events will be offered in-person only but are available virtually on the Friday following the event at eship.msu.edu/innovate-state/. Early registration is highly encouraged.

About our Speaker

Andrew Blake, President, Blake’s Family of Companies

An innovative entrepreneur, Andrew celebrates every aspect of what it means. A husband, father, farmer, business owner, and spiritual explorer are some of the avenues in which Andrew cultivates his perspective.

Andrew’s commitment to blazing his own trail has served him well professionally; he turned an obscure college idea, which would later become Blake’s Hard Cider Company, into one of the fastest growing beverage companies in the country. All of this happened while Andrew worked to evolve the fields that raised him, by transforming Blake Farms into a leader in the agricultural space and becoming one of the preeminent destinations in the Midwest.

Location

Entrepreneurship Lab (651 N. Shaw Ln., M025 Business Pavilion, East Lansing, MI 48824)

To access more information about Innovate State or the Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, please visit eship.msu.edu. For any further questions, please email Aubrey Haase, haaseaub@msu.edu.