Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine Are Building the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs With an Adidas & PENSOLE Partnership – And a New L.A. High School

For kids aspiring to be in the shoes of entrepreneurs like Dr. Dre or Jimmy Iovine, the The Defiant Ones co-stars are helping them design their own path, with a new partnership with Adidas and PENSOLE, and their expanded, multidisciplinary curriculum fit for L.A. high schools.

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In the fall, Adidas, PENSOLE and the Iovine and Young Academy — which the Beats co-founders started at the University of Southern California in 2013 for college students seeking integrated design, business and technology degrees — organized a series of “Wood U” workshops at USC, where students from Inglewood designed sneakers inspired by the themes of ambition, power and love.

Dr. D’Wayne Edwards, who founded PENSOLE in 2010 to give young design students equal opportunities to learn from the industry’s best, presented the fashionable final products last Friday (Feb. 11) during an outdoor pep rally at Audubon Middle School in Leimert Park in front of 400 students, faculty, alumni and Adidas personnel. There were also surprise performers, in West Coast rappers D Smoke and Roddy Ricch, and distinguished athletes, such as LA-bred Pittsburgh Steelers player JuJu Smith-Schuster and Los Angeles Sparks players and sisters Nneka and Chiney Ogwumike.

Dr. Edwards brought up the students from the different “Wood U” design groups up to the sun-soaked stage to catch the first glimpse of the shoes they designed — which included black Superstar sneakers with green and red tongues and laces designed by the “power” cohort — that launched in select L.A. Adidas stores on Feb. 7. “I felt very proud when I first saw the shoes,” one student told the audience, while another said, “When I first saw the shoes, I was impressed, because I didn’t expect them to turn out as good as they were.”

Grammy-nominated rapper and Inglewood native D Smoke, who helped out with the workshops, recalled observing one student associate a color with each attribute. “We’d put a core value up on the board, and a kid would associate a color with it. And the way he described it, you could kind of see it,” he tells Billboard. “So if it’s like, let’s say, strength, he would be like, ‘I believe strength is purple.’ And if we’re talking about designing shoes or designing anything, how to utilize colors to make people feel a certain way — he’s so far ahead. I’m 36 years old and I’m blown away by this kid.”

In the “Wood U” campaign video, the rapper, who also teaches at his alma mater Inglewood High School and named his first EP after it, narrates, “Imagine if creativity was actually taught. Because up until now, it hasn’t. The old school mentality doesn’t fit today’s curriculum. Kids can’t explore creative careers today because the system needs to be reimagined.”

And that’s exactly what Dre and Iovine plan to do with the new high school they’re launching with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), tentatively called Regional High School No. 1, in September 2022. The new magnet school, which will be located on the same campus as Audubon Middle School, will have 120 spots for ninth and 10th graders for the 2022-2023 academic year. Regional High School No. 1 will fashion the Iovine and Young Academy’s unique, innovative approach to teaching design, business and technology for high school students — through hands-on, real-world learning, as well as providing a cutting-edge college prep curriculum. Nine years after seeing the success of the Iovine and Young Academy at the collegiate level, Iovine tells Billboard that it was time to go one step lower to high schools — and they’re already considering taking it further down to middle schools.

“We have to get the kids early,” says the veteran executive, adding that he and Dre decided to make Regional High School No. 1 a public school so they could scale it and so kids could go for free. “We owe a lot to South L.A. Speaking for myself, I had to figure out a way to contribute back and pay that debt of what I owe to African American culture.”

His business partner Dre represented South L.A. (specifically Compton) while he led the Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium on Sunday with Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Mary J. Blige and Eminem, which also gave hip-hop a stage at the biggest sporting event in the world. “I’m very, very proud of that,” Iovine marvels days before the spectacular 15-minute performance. “To see hip-hop at the Super Bowl — finally, true hip-hop — you gotta hand it to Jay-Z and his team, [Roc Nation CEO] Desiree [Perez] and Roc Nation. They made this happen. You put Jay-Z and Dr. Dre together and something cool’s gonna happen every time.”

But the increased attention toward Inglewood, largely due to the construction of the $5.6 billion state-of-the-art stadium in 2020 and more economic development, has brought an onslaught of beneficial opportunities for the community — as well as detrimental ones. Investors and developers have been plotting to make Inglewood a modernized mecca for sports and entertainment, while increasing property values continue causing the city’s primarily Black and Latinx residents to endure escalating rent prices.

D Smoke sees both the good and the bad happening to his neighborhood. “You see some beautiful Black businesses popping up because they’re like, ‘Hey, look, this is going to change one way or another. Let’s create space, so we can have a say in the culture,’” he says. “Some of these Black businesses aren’t owned by people who grew up in Inglewood that I knew from high school. But they come in and respect the culture of the place, not just completely displacing people and what was there before. They incorporate people like myself and artists who have a heart for the community and know the full history.

“Traffic is crazy on game day, you know, so the city is making adjustments,” he continues. “There are people getting offers on their homes every day, and these are homes that their grandmother had. You hope that people know there’s an option to stay. There’s still a presence and a voice of people who have been invested in Inglewood for a long period of time.”

D Smoke, a UCLA graduate, found himself on the other side of the classroom shortly after finishing school when his mentor gave him a job tutoring, which instilled a passion to give back to his hometown. Part of what makes the rapper such an effective teacher is the realization that the students “don’t want to be preached at, they want to be identified with,” he explains, knowing that comes with intimately understanding the beauty and the struggle of being from that very neighborhood.

“The biggest misconception about Inglewood is that it’s all gang bang, all dangerous,” he adds, which corresponds to Dre’s famous line in his and 2Pac’s1996 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit “California Love” where he rapped, “Inglewood, always up to no good.” “Inglewood can be hood… but it’s not a ghetto. There’s a culture of hoodness that kind of influences how we move around and how we relate to each other. All in all, Inglewood is a very affluent, cultured, diverse place. People in Inglewood have a whole lotta pride in the fact that we’re officially called ‘the city of champions.’”

And with Regional High School No. 1, Dre and Iovine want to continue championing local students — not just giving them a level playing field, but giving them a leg up, with a multidisciplinary education based on collaborative innovation, so they’re equipped to run the world. “You always hear this term ‘underrepresented,’ ‘disadvantaged’ — but they also have superpowers,” says Iovine. “And because of the way they live, these things do cause different disciplines. And all we need to do is come in and bring it out and enhance it and support it.”

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And Dre and Iovine aren’t the only pair of hip-hop moguls who’ve shown outward support and provided educational and fiduciary resources for those budding entrepreneurs. Jay-Z and Pharrell Williams spotlighted plenty of Black-owned business from South L.A. and the people behind them — from Issa Rae and her namesake production company to Tré and Neighbors Skate Shop, one of the first skate shops in the hood — in their 2020 “Entrepreneur” music video. “We figured we didn’t need to be in the clip at all. Let us use all of that real estate to tell these amazing Black stories in real time, of different versions of success,” Pharrell tells Billboard.

And it’s a mission the Grammy-winning producer sticks to with his non-profit Black Ambition, which supports Black and Latinx entrepreneurs with opportunities and funding to get their businesses off the ground running. At the end of January, those entrepreneurs participated in their own mentor-led workshops, ranging from crowdfunding tactics to sustainable practices for local communities, and pitched their business ideas to the Adidas and Black Ambition Inglewood Prize Competition. The Tree Yoga Coop, a BIPOC-owned yoga cooperative in South L.A., was announced as the grand prize winner on Feb. 7 and will receive $15,000 in funding.

“At the end of the day, I know what my skill set is. My skill set is to galvanize and put the right people together. It’s a lot like making music, you know, putting this beat with that, putting this bass with that snare,” says Pharrell.

And sometimes, the music itself underscores their mission statement to help those growing up in South L.A. feel empowered to leave a mark by their own design on the world. Toward the end of the pep rally, D Smoke left the children at Audubon Middle School, where his own mother attended, with this verse from his 2019 song “Last Supper, whichhelped him win the inaugural season of Netflix’s Rhythm & Flow:

“This one’s for love, for mothers that’s grieving. It’s for that dreamer in that class that’s underachieving. This for believers whose faith is all that’s keeping them breathing. This the garden of Eden, this for all of my heathens. This one’s for Inglewood, both in Chicago and Cali. This one’s for Manchester and Crenshaw, for Rally’s.… I’ma bless the world with honest quotes in every sentence, and get better every moment just like Beverly mentioned. Hard times but never resentment, I stay forever relentless.”

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