Posted on July 7, 2026 by Wendy Frost
Creating a laboratory to test and improve entrepreneurship policymaking, the Alvarez College of Business opened the Alvarez-Powell Lab for Entrepreneurship Policy Prototyping.
Alexander Lewis
The lab was founded by Alexander Lewis, MA ’15, PhD ’20, the Melvin Lachman Chair in Entrepreneurship and an assistant professor of management in the college, and Ouafaa Hmaddi, a faculty member at the City College of New York.
The lab brings together researchers, entrepreneurs and policymakers to test, improve and design entrepreneurship policies that actually work for the people they’re meant to serve.
“We believe that entrepreneurship enriches communities, and smart policy can help it thrive,” said Lewis, who is also an Alvarez Fellow. “We are driven by the simple idea that entrepreneurship policy should be tested, not assumed.”
Working initially with underserved or overlooked regions, the lab is currently working on projects in the Bahamas, Ghana and Morocco.
In Ghana, they are working with researchers from the Africa Enterprise Lab at the University of Ghana. They are conducting an experiment with local entrepreneurs who will either interact with a Western GPT (artificial intelligence model) or a culturally competent localized GPT to receive business advice.
“We're cutting our teeth on this project,” said Lewis. “We’ll be looking for differences in uptake, usage rate, how they use it, how their use evolves and what impacts it brings to their businesses.”
Similarly in Morocco, researchers are testing what happens when entrepreneurs receive support from a normal GPT versus one that is trained to provide advice for businesses with constrained resources.
The next step for the lab is to focus on veteran entrepreneurship issues in San Antonio, which has one of the largest veteran populations in the United States.
“One of the best things about working at UT San Antonio is not just being a part of the city, but having an opportunity to contribute something toward its betterment,” said Lewis, who is a San Antonio native. “Our goal is to conduct research where the intervention itself is able to change the lives of the participants and the communities where that occurs.”
— Wendy Frost
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