Xavier University College Entrepreneurship Conference
Last week I took a day off of classes and headed down to Cincinnati for Ohio’s Only Statewide College Entrepreneurship & Ethics Conference and Competition (I think the name needs to be changed to…something you can remember). The conference was attended by graduate and undergraduate business and entrepreneurship students from several Ohio/Kentucky Colleges including: Ohio State – Fisher COB, Xavier – Williams COB, Bowling Green and Northern Kentucky – Haile COB. There were three components to the conference: a keynote addresses, breakout sessions (which took the form of lectures and/or forums) and a small business simulation.
Here were some of the highlights:
- Computer business simulation that required our team (four other Fisher Students and me) to run a coffee: setting pricing, ordering inventory, advertising, and hiring and firing.
- Breakout session reviewing the concepts behind Kim and Mauborgne’s book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant.
- Breakout session presented by Dr. Chris Manolis on Entrepreneurial Marketing.
- Breakout session presented by Dr. Ravi Chinta titled Model Business: A Tool for Business Plan Evaluation. Here, he described a 23-dimension rubric he used as a venture capitalist to evaluate a business plans—however it can also be reverse-engineered a give an entrepreneur a few things to think about when writing a business plan.
- Keynote Address by Pete Hensler, President of RC2 a toy and infant/toddler products company that licenses and sells John Deere, Disney, and Tommy the Tank Engine toys. The primary takeaways were to keep a global context (RC2 does much of its manufacturing in China, but has recently turned to the country as a new market for its products) as well as list of ten question that he asks himself everyday to keep him focused. Also, he ended his speech with this video…definitely worth a watch.
Reposted from aaron360.com.
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