Dec. 4—CHAMPAIGN — Tesla, YouTube, PayPal and Oracle are just a few of the wildly successful companies founded by entrepreneurs who went to the University of Illinois.

On campus, the UI has built a network of programs aimed at helping students to embrace an entrepreneurial spirit even earlier.

More than 60 teams of students pitched their products and startup ideas Friday at the Innovation Idea Fair, hosted at the Siebel Center for Design.

"Most of these projects won't develop into companies, but it's all about the idea of how to identify a value proposition, how to identify a customer segment, how to create value," said Jed Taylor, executive director of the hosting Technology Entrepreneur Center. "These are the entrepreneurial mind-sets you want students to have."

Many participants were freshmen and sophomores, making their first-ever public pitches to judges and classmates.

One team made up entirely of underclassmen, BeInvincible, pitched an app to help students find study spaces on campus.

"We're all in computer-related majors; we as students found this was an issue in our lives," said co-founder Varnika Jain, a freshman. "We want to implement something like this and even use it ourselves."

Judges' feedback helped them think about potential customers and ways to scale their business across different industries, she said.

Some presenters were more seasoned, having amassed capital from various campus competitions or even created a minimum viable product to show.

Both Ferritiva, a Research Park startup creating devices to detect iron deficiency, and Voca Health, an app to identify voice disorders, won cash prizes for their ideas at the Cozad New Venture Challenge this spring.

The annual competition is sponsored by local companies and UI colleges and programs. Next year's event will have a record $300,000 in startup capital available for student entrepreneurs.

Voca founder Shreya Rangarajan, a second-year student at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, came up with the idea seeking a more objective method to identify vocal problems, like the nodules that famously damaged Julie Andrews' singing voice.

Through a mix of campus programs, including the National Science Foundation-funded I-Corps, Rangarajan has sharpened her pitch, added four more students to her team and found an adviser.

"I don't know that I would have this opportunity anywhere else," she said. "There's a lot of support for student entrepreneurs here, and that's only going to continue to grow."

Between the Gies College of Business and Grainger College of Engineering and all the way to the EnterpriseWorks incubator operated by the Research Park, there's myriad resources and programs at the UI dedicated to building student entrepreneurs.

One of them starts in the dorms. Two floors of Townsend Hall on Illinois Street contain the Innovation "Living-Learning Community," where residents have access to mentors, classes and about $2,000 worth of grants to explore entrepreneurship interests right away.

"There's a lot of students who come to this campus interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, but it's this pie-in-the-sky pipe dream for them," said Samantha Koon, director of the Hoeft Technology and Management Program and lecturer for "TE 200: Introduction to Innovation." "We want students to understand that there's a whole ecosystem at the University of Illinois that's rooting for their success when it comes to innovation and entrepreneurship."

The Innovation Living-Learning Community is a partnership between University Housing and the Technology Entrepreneur Center. The latter was founded in 2000 with the goal of encouraging UI students, particularly the engineering-minded, to found startups of their own.

One of its close collaborators is the iVenture Accelerator, now a common launch point for student-led companies. To date, more than 300 student entrepreneurs and 100 ventures have "graduated" from the mentorship-heavy program housed in the Gies College of Business, which supplies ventures with $10,000 in funding without taking any equity.

Many of its cohorts seek to solve societal problems through their businesses, like Ferritiva, which is exploring the use of saliva-based tech to screen for iron deficiencies.

A second-place finish at this year's Cozad competition netted Ferritiva more than $20,000 in cash and more in mentoring and services, including a spot in the Research Park this summer.

The hope is to create a diagnostic tool for iron deficiency that customers can buy off the shelves at a local pharmacy. But the journey hasn't always been smooth, said co-founder Jeffrey Lu, now a student at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. He recalled a "botched" pitch he made at a recent event, where he didn't even finish what he'd prepared.

What he learned: Trust the people who work with him. At a recent showcase, he delivered his pitch alongside his team.

"It's a process of failure," he said. "You gotta embrace it. Be proud of your idea, talk to people and be very open to feedback. People are going to bring perspectives you don't have yourself."