The 10th annual Teen Entrepreneur Summer Academy gets underway on Monday. It’s hosted by the Richard M and Helen DeVos Center for Entrepreneurship in the Seidman College of Business. High school students from across West Michigan will spend a week at GVSU. They’ll learn about the world of entrepreneurship and creating a start-up company.
“The feedback we get from students is that the week is not long enough. They want it to be longer because they get so much out of it.”
Forty high school students from around West Michigan will be in attendance for a week at Grand Valley State University’s teen entrepreneur summer academy. Starting Monday, they’ll be immersed in the world of entrepreneurship. Here again is Shorouq Almallah… Director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, or CEI at the Seidman College of Business.
“We use entrepreneurial skillsets to recognize opportunities and come up with creative solutions to solve problems.”
Almallah says this year’s theme is centered on poverty and lack of access to health care.
“They’ll go through a poverty simulation to kind of better understand the struggles. They identify the problems, they can see the potential and they start coming up with solutions. We break them into teams.”
And those teams will be busy. The camp starts with team building activities, hands on research and local experts will address the students. The students are encouraged to be creative and think outside the box.
“There’s no such thing as a bad idea, it’s just about the execution, the research, the process. We literally fill the wall with hundreds of ideas. So we do want to foster that creative thinking and problem solving for young students.”
The academy concludes with cash prizes being awarded to the teams with the best entrepreneurship talents and ideas.
