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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Go Before You Know: The Power of Learning Through Doing
February 18, 2021
The stories behind many large, established businesses—from Waste Management to Walmart—often start the same way. A young person, motivated by a good idea, pursues small, uncertain niche opportunities. They do so without much capital, research, industry experience, or contacts. How does this happen? How does an inexperienced, cash-strapped entrepreneur manage to transform an unrecognizable idea into a sustainable success? Hint: It isn’t a propensity for taking risks. Origins and Evolutions of New Business Researcher…
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The Role of Curiosity in an Entrepreneurial Mindset
February 11, 2021
As children, all of us started life with a voracious appetite for knowledge. The more surprises we encountered in our everyday life, the more eager we were to figure out what was going on. But over time, we became less curious. According to author and psychologist Susan Engel, preschoolers between the ages of 3 and 5 will ask their parents between 25 and 50 questions per hour, yet they will ask less than two…
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