The Jazz Festival For Entrepreneurship
The New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week really was the jazz festival for entrepreneurship. I spent several days last week at the “festival” and was able to participate in a number of ways, including offering a mini demonstration of a 10,000 Small Businesses module, facilitating a round table discussion on the entrepreneurial ecosystem of greater New Orleans, and doing an IDEAInstitute session on entrepreneurship education. The icing on the cake was helping to judge the Coulter Challenge. In this event, teams of MBA students from several great schools around the country (UC Berkeley, Chicago Booth, Cornell, Kellogg, Loyola, Stanford, and Tulane) were assigned to work with a local entrepreneur to help them move forward toward their business goals. The teams did a fantastic job working with entrepreneurial efforts that spanned the range from gourmet meats to exclusive spa showers. As judges, our primary responsibility was to evaluate the impact the consulting teams had on their partner entrepreneurs. It was very easy to see that every team had made a huge impact on their entrepreneur. We saw changes in markets, pricing, products, and just about everything in between. (And congratulations to the Kellogg team and Rare Cuts).
We often talk about the importance of building entrepreneurship ecosystems through collaborative models that include all types of resource service providers and role models. The Idea Village was working in just such a model last week. The energy and enthusiasm was contagious. Congratulations to all those involved.
Patricia Greene
President’s Distinguished Professor Of Entrepreneurship