At NACCE’s Go West 2018 Summit in Burlingame, CA, ELI Vice President Rob Herndon sat on a lunchtime panel and presented to the over 200 in attendance on the importance of the methodologies employed in entrepreneurship education to change the overall systems of education.
Making the case that student motivation and success in our educational systems is directly related to how many opportunities they have to be “entrepreneurial,” Herndon led off the panel alongside Sierra College students Savanna Turner and Mason Sage, as well as Stanford Ph.D. student Maria Filsinger Interrante and MIT graduate Katelyn Sweeney. Herndon’s co-panelists spoke about their experiences with experiential learning and how it helped them to both achieve impressive results academically and in life, as well as its influence on their personal vision. By being given the room to think critically, find problems as well as solutions, and through meaningful mentorship, all four students have been given the tools to develop and achieve their own compelling goals.
Rob was also a co-presenter in a session highlighting entrepreneurial educator efforts in the Inland Empire/Desert Regional Consortium, along with Lisa Kiplinger Kennedy (Deputy Sector Navigator for Business and Entrepreneurship, IEDRC) and Ana Greif (Program Manager, Business Development, Pima Community College). The session showed participants how to problem find and solve using ELI’s Opportunity Discovery Process, as well as the Business Model Canvas, and included the efforts and goals of IEDRC to promote more entrepreneurial education.
NACCE’s Go West Conference was a collaborative conference for NACCE members in California, the northwest states and Canada, Lemelson-MIT Program invention education partners and educators, and other K-16 ecosystem members. The summit provided an opportunity for participants to learn about resources around making, inventing, and entrepreneurship and to collaborate on the development of contextualized entrepreneurship curriculum.
