The YouthBridge Community Foundation pledged $450,000 over the next three years to continue funding the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition in partnership with Washington University.

Each year, the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition (SEIC) awards between $25,000 and $35,000 to winning business teams that present innovative business solutions to social problems.

Four years ago, YouthBridge, a 135-year-old foundation supporting youth-focused social ventures, partnered with the Skandalaris Center in the Olin Business School to found the SEIC and create the YouthBridge Award. YouthBridge committed half a million dollars over the course of five years to facilitate the creation of innovative business solutions that can benefit the St. Louis community.

“This is the first year YouthBridge became the name sponsor of the competition. They were the organization that, four years ago, got the SEIC up and running, and now they’re committed to help us continue that program,” said II Luscri, student services coordinator of the Skandalaris Center.

Other sponsors include the Incarnate Word Foundation, Deaconess Foundation and the Lutheran Foundation of St. Louis.

Although the business school offers many entrepreneurship courses that help students develop their business plans, the competition is not only for business students. In fact, unlike the Olin Cup Competition—which requires at least one member of the team to be a University alumnus or student—the SEIC is open to anyone.

“The SEIC allows people to not only have ideas but to have support and realize their ideas,” said sophomore Atima Lui, owner of the student-run business Salon 40.

The SEIC launched last week with a team formation workshop. Later events include workshops on executive summaries, elevator pitches and business plans. Three rounds of competition involve a panel of more than 30 judges, all experts in various fields and industries. The first-place team is awarded $50,000 and the second-place team $20,000. An individual student award of $5,000 is also given out each year.

As in previous years, the competition began on ideabounce.com, an online forum where students can post and discuss potential business ideas.

“We already have 15 people declaring interest in the competition,” Luscri said on Monday, only three days after the competition began. “We have more students and organizations involved than ever before.”

This May, Rupununi Learners, an organization dedicated to bringing modern libraries to Guyana, received $25,000 as one of the five winning projects of 2009.

“I had maybe some of the right instincts, but I didn’t have any of the skills,” said Alice Layton, a former social worker who founded Rupununi Learners. “[The SEIC exposed] me to a knowledge base that I didn’t have, connected me to people with skills that I didn’t have and helped me develop ideas into plans.”

Other teams are similarly appreciative of gains from the competition.

“SEIC [gave us] that framework for finding out that [The Exchange] was a good idea. We didn’t enter to win; we entered to find out if it was good idea or not,” said Melanie Scheetz, founder of The Exchange project. “There is no way we could have come up with our plan without SEIC.”

Despite its successes, the Skandalaris Center continues to look for ways to expand and improve the competition, Luscri said. The Investor Presentation and Team Formation workshops are new additions to the SEIC this year—a response to the participant feedback from previous years.

“It would be better to have the center establish topics and ask [experts] to speak specifically on one topic,” Layton said. “I wanted fewer topics and more focused topics.”

A suggestion by Scheetz is to have more student involvement on teams that are not coming from the University community.

“I absolutely would have loved student involvement to help write up the plans,” she said. “We have to recruit Wash. U. students versus having them available to us.”

With YouthBridge Community Foundation now a name sponsor of the SEIC, the initiative to better the St. Louis community has continued to grow and evolve.

“The vision that business skills can improve social organizations needs to be matched with the vision that social organizations can improve business,” Layton said. “It has to be a two-way street. The nonprofit world should be impacting the business community.”

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Tags: Entrepreneurship, ideabounce, skandalaris center

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 1:42 am and is filed under Campus Events, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through this feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.