Blog: Rethinking Risk

A New Chapter for the ASU Risk Innovation Nexus

Over the past few years, the Arizona State University Risk Innovation Nexus (formerly the Risk Innovation Accelerator) has developed a unique and transformative set of tools and resources for entrepreneurs, innovators, and anyone struggling to navigate an increasingly convoluted landscape between good ideas and their successful execution.

Sadly, this phase of the Nexus is coming to an end as our initial seed funding wraps up. The good news though is that our tools and resources will continue to be freely available to anyone looking to develop an entrepreneurial edge in today’s complex world.

The seeds of the ASU Risk Innovation Nexus were planted several years ago, while I was working with entrepreneurial students at the University of Michigan. Faced with a bewilderingly complex landscape around emerging and hard to grapple with risks — many of them social and political in nature — it was clear that entrepreneurially minded creators of the future needed a completely new risk toolkit if they were to not just succeed, but succeed in a way that that was a win-win for them and society more broadly.

However, it wasn’t until 2016 that the ASU Idea Enterprise initiative provided the opportunity to transform these seeds into a flourishing enterprise.

With the encouragement of the Idea Enterprise and the support of Entrepreneurship + Innovation at ASU, we launched the Risk Innovation Accelerator in 2017 with the aim of providing time and resource-constrained entrepreneurs and others with a unique toolkit for navigating what we came to call ”orphan risks” — those hard to quantify and easy to ignore risks that nevertheless have a habit of coming back to bite.

In 2019 we changed our name to the Risk Innovation Nexus, reflecting the evolving nature of our approaches that empower anyone working at the nexus of entrepreneurship and social value creation in a rapidly changing world. And with it, we began to see those initial seeds transformed into a powerful array of tools and resources that uniquely support entrepreneurial success.

You can read more about what we’ve achieved over the past few years in our culminating report.

And looking forward, I’m excited to see how what we’ve achieved and produced will be used to build a future we can all aspire to.

In the meantime, I would encourage you to check out our extensive library of tools, resources and training materials, all of it geared toward equipping emerging entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurially-minded to thrive in a future where what determines success is very different than in the past.