After a semester of working closely with eight local emerging businesses, 24 students from the College of Business and Economics (COBE) wrapped up the spring 2010 semester last week by presenting their findings and recommendations to client companies.
The student-client team projects are a large part of the Managing an Emerging Business course, one of the more recent additions to COBE’s growing list of entrepreneurial courses. The class is taught by John Glerum of the Boise State TECenter, the technology business incubator and accelerator located in Nampa.
Each team of two or three students selected a company to work with at the beginning of the semester. Two of the client businesses this semester, Built-in Bike Light and Latitude Zero, are ventures founded by students within the class. The six other companies — AeroLEDs, eTripTrader, Extravagonzo Gourmet Foods, Recall InfoLink, Snapshot Postcard and Verdelight — are TECenter clients.
Throughout the semester, the students learned about tools and strategies for emerging businesses that they could apply to their real-world projects. The students were encouraged to apply knowledge gained from their other business courses to provide meaningful feedback to their client company.
“Our student team provided great value to eTripTrader by helping kick-start our marketing for our new SkedFlex product,” said Tom LaJoie of eTripTrader. “SWOT analysis, industry comparison, marketing strategy, expected ROI … the team did a great job of teeing it up for us.”
The next Entrepreneurial Management class is slated for spring 2011. For more information on the TECenter’s emerging companies, visit www.bsutecenter.com.
