Progress Magazine Annual Report 2011 - Eller College of ...

earning
their
honors
entrepreneurship honors
students compete in open
innovation challenge
Entrepreneurship is about
more than just launching
companies, as honors
students enrolled in the
McGuire Entrepreneurship
Program quickly discover.
Over the past several years,
these students have
augmented their venture
development experiences
by participating in open
innovation challenges
intended to effect real
change. The work of last
year’s honors students,
for example, resulted in an
alternate valuation model
that has been adopted
into the program’s
curriculum. Originally
proposed as a useful way
of looking at so-called
eco-ventures, the model
teaches students to
identify, analyze, and
articulate the noncommercial
values of a
venture, including social,
environmental, and
economic implications.
This year’s nine teams
of honors students were
challenged to create
a proposal for the
Daron Shade Photo
organization and
development of a
business plans group in
the Southern Arizona
innovation community.
“The availability of
business plans is a huge
hole in our region — there
is no one place where an
entrepreneur can go for
business plans development
in the community,”
pointed out Sherry
Hoskinson, director of
the McGuire Center for
Entrepreneurship.
Under the direction of
Matt Mars, lecturer in
entrepreneurship, the
honors teams conducted
research, explored model
scenarios, and made full
recommendations for the
formation of the business
plans group, all while
taking into consideration
a set of minimum
requirements defined
by the McGuire Center.
Matt Mars (center) with 2011 honors students.
“We were really pleased
with the proposals,”
Hoskinson said. “We
weren’t expecting to
adopt one single model
out of this challenge, but
to generate new thinking
on how to support
entrepreneurial capacity
in our region, and the
students definitely
brought that to
the table.”
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