Launching youth entrepreneurship
Laurie Stach founded LaunchX to provide high school students with practical entrepreneurship experience by helping them build and launch real companies. The program aims to bridge the gap between traditional academic education and real-world business application.
Why it matters
Programs like LaunchX address the need for experiential learning in STEM and business, preparing students for the modern workforce through hands-on entrepreneurship.
Even as a teenager, Laurie Stach ’06 says, she had a “crazy ambition to take on the world and solve problems.” At MIT, she realized she wasn’t the only one.
“Adults always see these youth who are good at math and science and say, ‘You’re going to do great things—someday,’” says Stach. “Meanwhile, traditional education isn’t preparing them.”
That’s why in 2012 Stach founded LaunchX, a for-profit entrepreneurship program that helps high school students build practical skills through an intensive summer program in which they start real companies. Stach says that students form teams, identify a problem, and build an actual product or service that they then take to market—often generating preorders or even revenue before the four-week program ends.
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