How the City of Albuquerque Grows Entrepreneurial Thinking From the Inside Out
January 25, 2022
Many cities have worked to attract entrepreneurs over the past decade. Albuquerque, New Mexico, is among them—but in an innovative twist, the fast-growing Southwestern city also worked to foster an entrepreneurial mindset from the inside out. City leaders aren’t looking for municipal employees to start their own businesses. Instead, they’re following the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative’s definition of entrepreneurship as the self-director pursuit of opportunities to create value for others. Here’s the story of how…
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College Success Reimagined: A Unique Approach in Wyoming
January 12, 2022
First-year college students often take some version of a success course designed to ease their transition into campus experiences. At Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the freshman success course used to be a series of basic how-to lessons on things like using the library. But when the college decided to move to a guided pathways model, it seized the opportunity for a revolutionary update to the one class that nearly all incoming…
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Applying an Entrepreneurial Mindset to a Tough Economic Reality
December 6, 2021
Sometimes the students in Assistant Professor James Myers’ Introduction to Entrepreneurship course balk when he assigns them to interview entrepreneurial thinkers in their lives. “Students say, ‘I’m running out of people to talk to!’” said Myers, an Assistant Professor in the business department at Pasco-Hernando State College in west-central Florida. He replies that they haven’t exhausted the supply—they’re just looking in the wrong places. “You have to go outside your immediate social circle,” he…
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Transforming Organizational Culture By Empowering Employees To Think Like Entrepreneurs With Tom Darling
December 3, 2021
We often think of government employees as the polar opposite of entrepreneurs. But what could happen if we teach them to think this way, transforming them into empowered employees? In this episode, we are joined by educator and entrepreneur Tom Darling. Tom serves the City of Albuquerque, New Mexico as a Division Manager of their Employee Learning Center. In addition, he has undertaken a radical experiment to teach the city’s employees to think like entrepreneurs.…
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The Untapped Potential of Unlikely Entrepreneurs
November 16, 2021
This post was originally published by the Independence Daily Reporter in the November 10th, 2021 issue. Read the text online here, the article is on page 3. What does the future hold for those who do not do well in school? Each year more than a million high school students drop out of high school. That’s nearly 7,000 per day. And in many cases, they do so not because they are incapable but because they…
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How A Single Teenage Mom Became A Successful Entrepreneur With Sirena Moore-Thomas
November 11, 2021
In this episode, Gary is joined by serial entrepreneur and public speaker Sirena Moore-Thomas. In the conversation, Sirena and Gary unpack her early life and how her experiences shaped her trajectory. As a single teenage mother of twins, raised in public housing, with no college degree, Sirena is the epitome of an unlikely entrepreneur. Her accomplishments—not the least of which is co-founding a million-dollar cleaning business with a few hundred dollars in her spare time—have garnered…
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Tackling Social Injustice Through an Entrepreneurial Mindset
October 27, 2021
The opportunities and resources for Black entrepreneurs and minority-led startups often presuppose a skill set that people who grew up in poverty don’t have. “A lot of the circles of support are for middle-class Black people,” explained Pastor Myron Pierce. Pierce serves as the pastor of the Mission Church in North Omaha, Nebraska. “There’s a language you have to speak, systems and structures and culture you need to know about—and that makes it hard…
Read morePlanting Seeds of Entrepreneurial Thinking—With a Homegrown Twist
October 13, 2021
One of the preeminent entrepreneurial thinkers in higher education lives and works in an unlikely place: a metro area of 246,000 residents just a couple of hours south of the Canadian border. Bree Langemo, lawyer and educator, exemplifies ELI’s definition of entrepreneurship. That is the self-directed pursuit of opportunities to create value for others, whatever the field or location. Langemo directs the Entrepreneurship Center at Concordia College’s Offutt School of Business in Moorhead, Minnesota.…
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How Wartime Survival Taught Me To Think Like An Entrepreneur With Faris Alami
As a Palestinian refugee growing up in Kuwait, Faris Alami was a straight-A student on his way to university and a stable career. And then life intervened when the Iraqi invasion turned his world upside down. Fresh out of high school, in the midst of a war zone, Faris found himself in charge of a local grocery store, a precarious experience that he barely escaped with his life. Yet, it was an experience that…
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