Events:
Idea-to-product Competitions
SEEC - North American Workshop

Overview

The Social Entrepreneurship Initiative (SEI) is a partnership involving engagement, outreach, community, and service-learning programs, Discovery Park, and students interested in entrepreneurship. Its goals include:

• Creating opportunities for students to learn about entrepreneurship;

• Enabling teams and their project partners to identify, protect, develop, and benefit from the intellectual property they create together;

• Establishing processes and facilities that enable teams to develop their prototypes into commercial quality products and services;

• Spreading the benefits of products developed by team by commercialization.

The SEI provides a natural pathway for students to learn about and experience entrepreneurship – via the projects that they develop for their partners in the community. They first design a product or service that fills a known need in their local community and then explore other markets for it. They must identify the broader social need their product addresses, the uniqueness of their product relative to others, the best way to protect the intellectual property they have created, and the most promising first market for their product.

Following this pathway leads teams to the National Idea to Product (I2P) Competition for Social Entrepreneurship. The judges in these competitions compare the product-feasibility plans of the teams that have entered to determine those that are most likely to be successful. This is very similar to the evaluation process used by the venture capital community and provides our students with a very valuable experience they can draw upon throughout their careers.

Congratulations to the top three teams of the 2009 I2P Competition:

Manna Energy Foundation - U. of Colorado, Boulder
ecoMOD Data - U. of Virginia
Solar Cycle - Brown University

Sponsored by

Acknowledgements: The Social Entrepreneurship Initiative is supported by Purdue’s Discovery Park, the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Cypress, HP, Hollister Inc., Krieg Devault LLP, the Lilly Endowment, NCIIA, and the University of Texas at Austin. It is through their continued support and appreciation for the initiative that the program can offer students this learning experience.