Hiram College hosted the Entrepreneurship Education Consortium’s (EEC) ideaLabs 2012 competition in March, where budding entrepreneurs from Hiram and nine other Ohio colleges pitched their ideas for new businesses.
EEC’s ideaLabs is a business idea competition where undergraduates pitch their best entrepreneurial ideas to a panel of experts. The competition encourages students from all disciplines to think about new venture ideas, applying the feasibility study methodology and answering three key questions: Is there a market? Do the financials make sense? What resources are necessary? The winners took home cash prizes and high hopes that their big ideas would translate into big money down the road:
First Place - $5,000: “The Pothole Patch” - Nicholas Barron, Case Western Reserve University
Second Place - $3,000: “EvenPlayingField.com” - James Basar and Amanda Mass, Baldwin-Wallace College
Third Place - $1,000: “Fresh Scent Surgical Masks” - Breana Jacobs and Chad Radke, Kent State University
The competition’s judges, including Burton D. Morgan Foundation Trustee Marty Erbaugh, were impressed with the quality of all the presentations.
“In my work, I see many presentations, often from entrepreneurs with more than 20 years of industry experience,” said John Dearborn, an ideaLabs judge and President of JumpStart, a nonprofit supporting Northeast Ohio entrepreneurs. “The student participants and their coaches should be proud. They clearly put in a great deal of effort and their presentations were as good or better than any I have seen.”
Undergraduate students or teams of students from Ashland University, Baldwin-Wallace College, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, Hiram College, John Carroll University, Kent State University, Lake Erie College, The University of Akron, and University of Mount Union competed.
The competition was sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Education Consortium (EEC), a consortium of nine schools that encourages student exploration of new, innovative ideas in their quest to either create new enterprises or become entrepreneurs within existing organizations.
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