Making and selling – or in this case, giving away – lemonade has been an inside theme for UB’s chapter of Blackstone LaunchPad, a national student entrepreneurship program of Blackstone Charitable Foundation that is now on 64 campuses, with UB’s among the most active.

The UB program’s director, Hadar Borden, tells new students that every kid who ever set up a lemonade stand has already been an entrepreneur – so how out of reach can it be? And, she hopes, the gesture of actually offering students lemonade will make them feel right at home in the program’s new space on the third floor of UB’s Student Union.

After seven years of mentoring thousands of students in entrepreneurial skills and helping launch dozens of new companies, UB’s LaunchPad is scaling to a much bigger space, larger staff, more events and competitions and a new name: The UB Startup & Innovation Collaboratory Powered by Blackstone LaunchPad – The CoLab for short.

The expansion and rebrand began in the spring with a $300,000 investment from UB and additional funding from Blackstone, which allowed Borden to go from a one-employee operation (with lots of volunteer help) to hiring a team of four coordinators to run it as its own department of UB under the Office of Student Life.

This semester, Borden has also hired 18 student assistants, many of them work-study students, to be the greeters offering lemonade to CoLab visitors and guiding them into the space that could be their entry into Western New York’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“It’s a way of taking startups and innovation – which can seem a little scary – and presenting it as, ‘Hey, this is something I did as a kid,’” Borden said. “And when someone offers you lemonade, all the guards and gates come crumbling down, you can meet them where they are and support them.”

There’s been a lot of lemonade trading hands at UB in the week leading up to the relaunch starting at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday at UB’s Student Union Theatre.

To help spread the word, the CoLab invited student groups and clubs to compete in a “Spilling the Lemonade” competition to see which ones can hand out the most free lemonade – single pouches of Capri Sun – in exchange for students “checking in” to UB CoLab with their campus events pass. The winning club will get a $500 prize.

“It’s a way to get our new name out and energize people about the rebrand,” Borden said.

Pretty much everything LaunchPad – now CoLab – has an entrepreneurial spin and motivational meaning. Since 2016, it all resided in a former storage closet at 220 Student Union that had barely 800 square feet of space for students to cram around a big white table where ideas were hatched.

At the new digs in a former game room one floor above, there’s another big white table and several smaller ones, flexible lounge areas with movable furniture and (of course) whiteboards on the walls, as well as five adjacent offices for Borden and her staff – a total of 2,082 square feet of space for brainstorming, plan-making, pitch-honing, venture-coaching, workshops, master classes and innovation competitions, among many events powered by Blackstone.

The décor consists of lots of UB blue and bright lemon yellow, mindfully sourced from local companies and artisans, a reminder that “We want them to stay local and we honor local businesses,” Borden said.

At the entrance, across from a lemonade stand with bright yellow stools, a neon lemon sign and a bowl of plastic lemons, are posters by Oxford Pennant, a Buffalo company that makes wool felt pennants, flags and banners for consumer brands such as Adidas, Harley-Davidson, J. Crew and Urban Outfitters, as well as custom items and apparel, many of which tout Buffalo pride.

One of the posters the company made for CoLab says “Time to Make Lemonade.” Another is filled with startup slogans such as “Ready, Set, Pitch!” and “Our middle name is Pivot.”

There’s also an array of repurposed mail slots that will hold 56 blocks with the names of companies founded through the program – from ACV Auctions, Buffalo’s first billion-dollar “unicorn,” and Treska Design engineering consultants to RHM Innovations assisted living products and Better Mynd mental health services for college students.

Borden said the new space may be bigger, but it conveys the same vibe as the little office downstairs, which may eventually go back to being a storage closet.

“As big as we get, I always want to continue that sense of being part of a community that makes and innovates,” Borden said. “Yes, you are learning skills to compete in business, but you’re also part of a family, and that’s what’s so special about the place.”

Karen Utz, the WNY regional director for Empire State Development, arrived in that role early this year from UB, where she administered the START-UP NY tax incentive program for companies operating on or near campus.

She had a front-row seat on the UB LaunchPad’s role in nudging students away from the assumption they would pursue careers with established multi-national corporations and toward “the world of early-stage start-ups, where there are risks and challenges, where you need to nimble and discover failure is not fatal, and where you need to be willing to pivot,” she said.

“That’s a newer mindset, and Blackstone LaunchPad had a huge role to play in that process,” she said.

Utz will be a speaker at Tuesday’s ribbon-cutting for The CoLab, which she hopes will play an even greater role in WNY’s economic future.

“It’s a terrific feeder to other programs within our region, and we’re delighted to see the progress they are making and the impact they’ve had on generating enthusiasm for a new way of talking about work,” she said.