Sean Sylvester was a fast-moving fashion designer. On lunch breaks and after work, he’d hawk his designer line of street wear out of the trunk of his Chrysler. Eventually, six South Florida stores were stocking his Miami-centric, hip-hop-influenced line, Voler La Rue. But Sylvester, B.B.A. ’04, wanted to switch the operation to a higher gear.

He found guidance at The Launch Pad at Toppel, a new walk-in resource on the Coral Gables campus for UM’s community of entrepreneurs and innovators.

“It’s great to come back after a couple of years and be welcomed with open arms,” says the former business management major. “You get a lot of rejection on the street. This gives you validation and gets you on the right path.”

A component of the Toppel Career Center, The Launch Pad, which opened last fall, is one of many signs that start-up spirit is flourishing across the University. And Sylvester is just one of hundreds of current and former students reveling in the flurry of activity.

Entrepreneurial enthusiasm is a nationwide phenomenon, says William Scott Green, vice provost and dean of undergraduate education. In 2006 he chaired the Kauffman Foundation Panel on Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Education, which reported a near five-fold increase in entrepreneurship majors, minors, and concentrations at U.S. institutions, from 104 to more than 500 between 1975 and 2006; the number of individual courses in the subject grew exponentially.

“There’s been a change in the norms of higher education. Entrepreneurship has become a mainstream activity,” Green told Entrepreneur Magazine, which highlighted The Launch Pad in its April issue as one of a handful of cutting-edge collegiate programs for entrepreneurs.

A key purpose of initiatives like The Launch Pad, Green stresses, is “to show students that entrepreneurship is a legitimate career option, a reasonable way to imagine making a living.”

The UM community clearly shares that vision. Green says that when he convened a task force from UM’s 12 colleges and schools to discuss additional resources the Toppel Career Center should offer, entrepreneurial support was a recurring theme across all disciplines.

With initial funding from the Office of the Provost, Launch Pad executive director Susan Amat, B.L.A. ’01, M.B.A. ’04, Ph.D. ’08, hit the ground running last September, immediately securing an impressive roster of speakers, including couture jewelry designer Ramona Boucher, whose pieces appeared in the Sex and the City movie; Entrepreneur Magazine’s 2008 Entrepreneur of the Year, Devon Rifkin; and top economist William Baumol.

Response to The Launch Pad was instant—and decisive. Within its first semester, more than 400 students and alumni posted profiles to its Web site, www.thelaunchpad.org, giving them free access to an extensive suite of resources and services—from one-on-one consultations to discuss business ideas to mentoring relationships with successful businesspeople who serve as “venture coaches.” The new Launch Pad Fellows and Liberty City Business Opportunity programs are opening the venture to the broader community.

“We also bring in lawyers, venture capitalists, and industry experts to help on individual projects,” explains Amat, an experienced businesswoman who has founded a few companies of her own, including the successful concert promotion and band management company she started at age 15.

Located accessibly online and in the Whitten University Center lobby, The Launch Pad draws more than just business majors. Participants run the gamut from computer whizzes and scientific researchers to music impresarios, fashion divas, and filmmakers.

A sports drink, a mobile occupational therapy van, even a company that would sell trips to outer space are among the hundreds of ideas Amat and her staff of two full-time employees and several interns are shepherding through the start-up maze. “We never know what’s going to come through our door,” marvels Amat, who also teaches in the School of Business Administration.

Launch Pad client Severin Romanov, a business administration and finance major at UM, appreciates the assistance he received in growing his business plan for Time Vend, an online advertising service that gives local retailers a way to compete with larger companies. “It’s been tremendously helpful,” he says. “I get to bounce my ideas off experts and get great feedback.”

But Amat and Green say it is actually brave new entrepreneurs like Romanov whom, if properly nurtured and given half a chance, we’ll be thanking—for their ability to fuel a sputtering market with innovative solutions, capital, and employment opportunities. One way The Launch Pad ensures that these well-trained entrepreneurs will pump South Florida’s economy with fresh ideas and start-up ventures is by connecting them with the local business community.

“The Launch Pad is a tremendous vehicle for tapping the creativity, ideas, and energy of young entrepreneurs who may become some of the Bill Gateses of the future,” says Launch Pad advisor Manny Mencia, senior vice president of international business development at Enterprise Florida, the state’s official economic development organization. “It is so appropriate for Florida, particularly South Florida, because our geo-graphic position requires us to put greater emphasis on growing our own companies.”

Other area partners include the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce, Florida Venture Forum, the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, and SCORE’s Miami chapter.

At the UM Global Business Forum in January, Green moderated a panel of high-profile experts who positioned entrepreneurship as the engine of the new world economy.

“Entrepreneurship is one of the few careers you can engage in while you’re still in college,” Green offers. “It’s no longer enough for us to help students find a job. We have to teach them how to make a job.”

The Launch Pad complements a host of entrepreneurial programs University-wide. At the Frost School of Music, for example, there is the Music Business and Entertainment Industries track, as well as student-run Cat 5 Music Publishing and ’Cane Records.

In addition to its entrepreneur major, the School of Business Administration runs an annual student entrepreneurship competition, a consulting program, an internship/fellowship program, a think tank, and other entrepreneurial elements, all cleverly branded under the moniker e360˚.

Marc Junkunc, an assistant professor in the school, says every year since he was hired in 2005 to teach entrepreneurship he’s seen the “momentum and excitement” for entrepreneurship growing at the University.

Engineering, medical, and science faculty and researchers are also tapping the vein of entrepreneurship via two-year-old UM Innovation, which comprises a patent and copyright committee, an office of technology transfer, the Wallace H. Coulter Center for Translational Research to provide seed money and lab space for promising discoveries, a planned life science park to house spinoffs, corporate and scientific advisory councils, a conflict of interest group, and an annual technology showcase.

“UM Innovation was created to advance technologies discovered at the University,” says its founder and developer Bart Chernow, a Miller School of Medicine professor and vice provost for technology advancement. “This effort has included the development of several spinoff ventures.”

Green notes The Launch Pad’s synergy with these initiatives. “Entrepreneurship is a primary way of engaging what you know and using it to make the world better,” he explains. “It’s almost impossible to replicate in the classroom the excitement, immediacy, and intensity of starting a new venture. Students learn by doing it, by trying, by experimenting, by putting it on.”

Just two months after its September debut, The Launch Pad orchestrated UM’s first-ever participation in Global Entrepreneurship Week, an initiative that drew almost 1,200 participants worldwide in 2008. Hosting a record-setting 40-plus diverse events across the University over five days last November, The Launch Pad became the initiative’s number-one American partner.

“There is so much entrepreneurial potential in all disciplines on a campus that you have to find more informal ways to allow people to dip their toes into it,” explains Global Entrepreneurship Week president Jonathan Ortmans, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which started the annual event in 2007. “Entrepreneurs birth the new. And so we say to students, come together and try to birth something. This is one of the unique times in your life when you have the luxury of time to integrate people from disparate disciplines and cultures.”

Last year’s Global Entrepreneurship Week gave alumna Aparna Saini precisely that chance. The psychology major and business administration minor was so excited she baked a cake—and passed out samples to potential customers during the entrepreneur fair to promote her new business, Aparna’s Cakes. From guava cream cheese to chocolate fudge with raspberry amaretto mousse, Saini custom-makes and decorates any confection she or her customers can dream up.

“I started getting involved with The Launch Pad during its first semester,” Saini says. “They had a lot of good advice about my business name and promotions for my business.”

Before, she never imagined her passion could amount to anything more than a side gig. “The Launch Pad really allowed me to see there is a market for it,” Saini explains. “A lot of what The Launch Pad did for me was mental. It helped me believe in my business and myself.”

Global Entrepreneurship Week returns November 16-22.

University of Miami editor Robert C. Jones Jr. contributed to this story.