Ditching the Easy Fix at Victor Valley College
February 27, 2023
If you’re always implementing an easy fix, you’re probably looking at all your problems as technical issues rather than complex, adaptive ones. But it can be hard to find the motivation. Not to mention the time to peel back the layers of those big, intractable issues and devise solutions. Here’s a pep talk in the form of an example from Victor Valley College in Victorville, California, where McKenzie Tarango is the Dean of Instruction,…
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.…
Read moreA Florida College Removes Barriers to Entrepreneurship Education
September 10, 2021
The Broward College Entrepreneurship Experience (BCEx) is an ambitious framework designed to expand ideation and value creation among the college’s 63,000 students. In addition to creating thousands of entrepreneurs, the bigger goal is to create a culture shift that instills an entrepreneurial mindset across Broward College—impacting faculty, staff, and students. BCEx uses the Ice House model to introduce entrepreneurship as the self-directed pursuit of opportunities to create value for others, whether in their business…
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A Managerial vs. Entrepreneurial Approach to Leadership
August 31, 2021
You might have seen the recent Inside Higher Ed article published in March of 2021 titled “Colleges a ‘Juicy Target” for Cyberextortion.” As if mask mandates (or lack thereof), vaccination hesitancy, the Delta Variant, and all the other disruptions that we’ve seen over the last 18 months aren’t enough, now cybercriminals have our schools in their crosshairs. And it’s not just higher ed institutions that are at risk. Someone could soon find my 5-year-old niece’s…
Read moreDeveloping an Entrepreneurial Mindset on the Path to Recovery
May 14, 2021
Judy Raper never saw herself as someone whose entrepreneurial mindset would make an impact on her community. She might have pointed to her younger sister, a CEO, as the mover and shaker in the family. Then Raper learned a new definition of entrepreneurship as the self-directed pursuit of opportunities to create value for others. She realized that by creating value for others, we empower ourselves. She realized that the Ice House training she…
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The Time Is Now: The Entrepreneurial Mindset Imperative
April 13, 2021
Im-per-a-tive (Noun): An essential or urgent thing; of vital importance Download the White Paper Here Life today is filled with imperatives. Everything seems urgent and critically important in vying for our attention daily. As such, when we sat down to write our new white paper, we did not decide to call it the Entrepreneurial Mindset Imperative lightly. Between the pandemic, political strife, social strain, and massive changes in education and the workplace, the world is making…
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Ten Years of Unlikely Entrepreneurs
March 17, 2021
2021 marks the 10-year anniversary of the Ice House Entrepreneurship Program! It’s been a decade filled with lightbulb moments as training participants started to understand entrepreneurship as the self-directed pursuit of opportunities to create value for others. There are many, many success stories of people who have empowered themselves by creating value for others. What’s especially remarkable is the diversity of those individuals. From high school students in Mexico to inmates in Mississippi, or college…
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Spreading the Power of Entrepreneurial Thinking Statewide in North Carolina
March 4, 2021
This piece was written by ELI contributor Sarah Williamson. She is working on interviewing some of our most accomplished partners and facilitators. Daisy Magnus-Aryitey doesn’t love public speaking, but you would never know it from her enthusiastic demeanor when she starts to talk about the importance of an entrepreneurial mindset. Magnus-Aryitey, an Ice House Facilitator, is the program director for the NC IDEA Foundation. The foundation fosters North Carolina’s economic development by supporting the entrepreneurial…
Read moreEngaging New Partners to Build Entrepreneurial Communities
January 8, 2019
By Gary Schoeniger & Chris Thompson, president of Civic Collaboration Consultants, LLC We all know that entrepreneurship is vital to creating prosperous communities and the need to encourage and support entrepreneurial activity at all levels of society has never been more important than it is today. After all, entrepreneurs have become the engines of economic growth, not only starting new businesses that create jobs and revitalize our communities but also…
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