Entrepreneur Idol shines a spotlight on young go-getters
BYLINE: Peter Key
The winner probably won't get a recording contract, but he or she won't have to take abuse from Simon Cowell, either.
Temple University and the city of Philadelphia are teaming up to sponsor a contest called Philadelphia's Student Entrepreneur Idol, in which undergraduate students from local colleges will compete for a $1,000 prize.
The event is the second aimed at promoting entrepreneurship on area campuses put on by Temple with help from the city. The first, the Greater Philadelphia Entrepreneurial Campus Summit, attracted 350 people to hear local entrepreneurial celebrities Warren V. "Pete" Musser and H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest speak last spring.
Entrepreneur Idol contestants won't have to submit business plans, just register and show up at Mitten Hall on March 2. Once there, they will be asked to perform tasks such as coming up with marketing slogans for Philadelphia or devising interview questions to spot people who would make good employees.
Seven judges will winnow the entrants down to two contestants over four rounds. The finalists will compete for the top prize by doing a small project.
The winner also will be treated to a private lunch with the contest's keynote speaker, Richard Caruso. The founder and chairman of Integra Life Sciences Holdings Corp. of Plainsboro, N.J., Caruso was named the 2006 National Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young and the Kauffman Foundation.
Judges include Richard A. Bendis, president and CEO of True Product ID Inc. and former president and CEO of Innovation Philadelphia; Nicole Cashman, founder of Cashman & Associates; and Paul Green, founder of the Paul Green School of Rock.
The contest is the brainchild of Temple alumna Rebecca Davis, who won Temple's business plan competition in the spring of 2004 with her plan for starting a nonprofit dance company and school.
The Rebecca Davis Dance Co. is up and running, but she also works at the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Institute in Temple's Fox School of Business. There, she was asked to come up with a way for the institute to celebrate National Entrepreneurship Week.
"I thought ... it should be something that appeals to young people and is different than the typical business plan competition," she said.
Both those qualities were appealing to Josh Sevin, Philadelphia's manager of knowledge-industry initiatives. Sevin also liked the fact that although the contest was being held at Temple, it wasn't just open to Temple students.
"When it comes to entrepreneurship, people always talk about building a culture and that's a challenging thing to do, but I think events like this, which I think are a bit more creative, and which are trying to reach across the schools are a really positive model to follow," he said.
The city is sponsoring the event through Campus Philly, a nonprofit that works to get college students involved with the area in the hope that they'll remain in it after they graduate.
Campus Philly also, with the help of the city, manages the Knowledge Industry Partnership. In addition to getting students involved with the area while they're here, it has programs for attracting potential students and helping them find jobs after they graduate.
The idea of bringing entrepreneurially minded students from multiple campuses together was hatched by Irv Safra, a longtime area technology entrepreneur, who retired two years ago.
Safra, a member of the Entrepreneurs Forum of Greater Philadelphia's board of directors, put together a group of representatives from eight area business schools and the University of Singapore, which sends students to spend a year at the University of Pennsylvania.
The group typically gets together before meetings of the Entrepreneurs Forum to discuss entrepreneurship initiatives on their campuses and ways they can tie them together. The first result was the Entrepreneurial Campus Summit last year.