2022 Titan of Tech: Nada Miljkovic

Nada Miljkovic is a multi-disciplinarian educator, entrepreneur, and artivist (artist-activist). She teaches a wide variety of subjects from entrepreneurship, digital storytelling, and the ethics of emerging technologies. She works with students of all ages from eleven year olds to college and MBA and graduate students. She traveled the world with the Stanford Precollegiate International Institutes, particularly in Latin America, teaching hundreds of middle schoolers and high school students. Her entrepreneurship curriculum is based on the National Science Foundation Innovation-Corp Lean Startup Methodology. She participated at the national level of the NSF I-Corp program Fall of 2019.

Why Nada is a Titan

By Manel Camps

The original vision of GetVirtual was co-founded by Nada Miljkovic and Toby Corey in response to the confinement mandated when the COVID pandemic hit in March 2020. The idea was to help local business adjust to the disruptions caused by the pandemic while providing students with experiential learning opportunities.

Success Metrics

166 students have taken the class with 130 from UCSC and over 30 students from all across the UC Campuses. In addition, over 100 additional student volunteers have also joined the program from all over the State to work in our teams.
GetVirtual has completed 148 successful client projects with 70% of those businesses residing in the City of Santa Cruz.
GetVirtual has received $100,000 from the City of Santa Cruz to support the students that continue with the program after finishing the class, and $40,000 from the UC Santa Cruz Trustees to cover the expenses of Crown 95 instruction. Another $40,000 were obtained from COVID emergency funding.
Local businesses have received over $300,000 worth of services from our students for free. The first completed project was for the Pacific Trading Company and the owners say that we saved their visit. Another client, Sew Rose has seen an over 100% increase in business. This Small business owner has been in business for over 20 years and claims that the reason for the boom in business is from the new website that GetVirtual built for them.

2022 Innovations

In 2022 Nada has continued to innovate, moving GetVirtual in two three directions: specialization, presence in online education, and outreach to underserved students.

Crown 91 Marketing For Good. Nada designed and oversaw the launching a sister class to Crown 95, Crown 91 (Marketing For Good) in Spring 2022. This class was taught by local former Apple Creative Director, Rick Vargas, that uses the same model but does a deeper dive into the Marketing Brief and creating more assets than just a website and social media campaigns provided by GetVirtual. This class has successfully launched 5 client projects and working on 5 more this Fall Quarter. One of the Marketing for Good businesses, Sequoia Retreat Center website launch created by the students has increased their revenue significantly.

This was a highly innovative project that involved recruiting a high-profile instructor and finding the right mix of students and clients for a class with a narrower focus on marketing. It also points the way for the creation of other, more specialized opportunities for experiential learning serving local businesses.

UCSC GetVirtual Coursera. In partnership with Online Education, Nada Miljkovic has completed and launched the UCSC GetVirtual Coursera that features both a free version and a paid Honors version. She plans to translate the course into other languages, beginning with Spanish, in the near future.

Internship at Santa Cruz SBDC. Nada launched a pilot internship program in partnership with the Santa Cruz SBDC. There are 7 students GetVirtual Executive Board members working on this program working on 10 projects for SBDC clients, with two contracts totaling $30,000.

Nada has been a major leader in the development of an entrepreneurship curriculum at UCSC and through GetVirtual and our students an amazing opportunity to use their training in ways that make a real impact on our community. GetVirtual is an amazing success story that is continuing to grow, having been adopted by other campuses across the nation and also attracting students from the entire UC system. Based on this, I think she deserves to be acknowledged as a Titan of Tech.