Student entrepreneurship: Taking ideas to market

Her display featured approximately 30 home décor items, from coffee mugs to table lamps, that ranged from $15 to $100.  

Two weekends later, the first-year University of Cincinnati student had only three items left for sale.  

“As an artist to think that somebody cares enough this early on in my journey, and they like my stuff enough to buy it — it’s very, very rewarding,” Cronin said.

A communication design major, Cronin is one of a dozen College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) students selected to participate in the December 2025 pop-up at ADAAPT, a student-focused incubator space in Cincinnati’s historic Findlay Market. 

The pop-up is one of many programs overseen through the college’s ADAAPT Innovation Studio, which helps students test, refine and showcase business ideas.

Launched exactly a year ago, the retail space concept grew out of a vision by associate professor and DAAP creative entrepreneurial lead Steven Doehler, who sees DAAP as a student-driven “idea factory” well matched to thoughtful, meaningful shopping trends.

At the ribbon cutting, Doehler said: “At DAAP, we are fertile ground for idea cultivation. Every semester, the region’s most thought-provoking and innovative ideas sprout from our college’s classrooms in the form of conceptual reality.

For the application based holiday pop-up, participants received microgrants to cover materials, then spent weeks developing products and learning what it takes to sell them, from pricing and packaging to staffing and promotion. 

That “idea-to-market” journey is exactly what Ben Booker is trying to make more visible for all UC students.   

Booker, a UC alumnus who studied finance and real estate, serves as UC’s small business coordinator, splitting his time between the Center for Entrepreneurship in the Carl H. Lindner College of Business and the 1819 Innovation Hub.

UC’s programs are noted nationally, most recently earning a spot among The Princeton Review’s Top 50 undergraduate entrepreneurship programs.

For Gabrielle Ragusa, that behind-the-scenes work was the point. 

A second-year Master of Landscape Architecture Degree student at DAAP who will graduate in the spring, Ragusa said she first connected with Booker after he attended a studio presentation tied to another project. She later worked with him during a summer co-op and decided she wanted to support ADAAPT’s mission. 

This semester, Ragusa is vice president of a student chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects. In the fall 2025 semester, she and a classmate applied for the holiday market grant opportunity alongside first-year students, with an eye toward skills building and club support. 

Her group created laser-cut ornaments, Cincinnati-themed cards, garland and trinket boxes. Ragusa said the team’s product sales were modest, but she framed the experience as a practical training run for first-year students and a way to raise funds for model-making materials, conferences and professional development. 

“It’s easy to see the many ways in which having a student-focused incubator space is a boon to folks of all disciplines,” Ragusa said. 

She also emphasized that the pop-up’s learning value wasn’t limited to product design, but credentialing — earning their laser certifications through the 1819 Innovation Hub. 

“It was a really great opportunity for folks to see how much has to happen outside of the product development portion of entrepreneurship,” Ragusa said, describing responsibilities that included packaging, staffing, tracking transactions — even finding change for the cash box. 

Across the broader holiday market effort, Ragusa said DAAP students collectively sold approximately $4,000 in merchandise over two weekends, with items ranging from low-cost stickers to the higher-priced lamps. 

She said the standout moment was watching younger students step into entrepreneurship early, in public and in conversation with real customers. 

“I think it’s a really brave thing to do to take on something of this magnitude in your very first year, very first semester of a program,” she said. 

Cronin felt that same shift — the move from making something to realizing it can live in someone else’s home: “It’s gratifying,” she said.

Booker’s larger goal is to make those early wins easier to reach, even if the long-term success stories take time. He describes ADAAPT as part of a longer “entrepreneurial journey” — a series of stepping stones that can begin with pop-ups and grow into more sustained opportunities through UC’s Center for Entrepreneurship. 

And Ragusa is already investigating what that next stage could look like. 

“I’m experimenting with what a maker-in-residence program could look like so that we are open consistently and can keep the shelves stocked,” she said. 

For students like Cronin, the next step is simpler but just as meaningful: to keep going. 

Because for the first time, she says, her long contimplated idea didn’t stay on the shelf — it sold.

Featured image at top of ADDAPT storefront for winter holiday market. Photo/Cronin.