February 22, 2008 - 2:28am
Students entrepreneurs have been hard at work for the last few weeks at Malaspina University-College.
A project in the Bachelor of Business Administration program had students creating and implementing their own businesses over a three week period with all funds raised going to the United Way and the Malaspina Foundation.
“The ideas the students came up with are fantastic,” said Chris Jaeger, a professor in the Faculty of Management, who is teaching the class. “Everyone was positive about each others work and their own individual experiences. It was quite an eye opener for them.”
The entrepreneurship project gave four teams ten dollars to start and launch ventures over a four week period. The limitation on starting funds was intended to teach students that entrepreneurs don’t start out with a lot of resources and often need to overcome their limitations. Students were allowed to raise up to $500 from investors (in $50 increments) but no more.
“Allowing the students to raise investor’s funds taught them about negotiation,” said Jaeger. “They had to decide how much importance and time to put into accessing third party investments. Everyone had setbacks coming from areas they weren’t expecting, but that created opportunities for them to fine tune their business ideas and look at different ways to adapt their business models.”
The four teams business ideas included a Guitar Hero competition, a raffle for a reserve parking spot at Malaspina, an advertising/raffle project and a sale of Valentine’s candygrams.
“This is a great project,” said Justin LaBrie, a fourth year Business Administration student, who worked on the advertising/raffle project. “It’s good for students to apply things to the real world. Something like this really gets the wheels in motion.”
LaBrie’s group came up with the idea of developing a guerrilla marketing firm. Basically, their group took donations from companies that usually can’t afford advertising and put their logo and a sales pitch on raffle tickets they sold. Their raffle included prizes of two nights at the Sunrise Ridge resort in Parksville and a grotto spa package at Tigh-Na-Mara. They also sold sixty second advertising spots during their class presentation for the project.
“We just stopped our presentation and went into a pitch,” said LaBrie. “We gave advertisers 60 seconds with a completely captivated audience for 50 dollars.”
“This project was harder than we initially thought,” said Brenden Stewart, whose group sold candygrams for Valentine’s day. “It was challenging to come up with ideas, but our group loved the hands on experience this project gave us.”
In the end, Jaeger was very pleased with the outcome and expects to assign the project on a regular basis from now on. The student businesses raised just under $1000.
“This is the first time we’ve done this project at Malaspina and I’m very happy with how it turned out. The project is definitely generating interest in the class from future students,” added Jaeger.
All projects wrapped up on Tuesday, February 19, with all funds raised going to the United Way and the Malaspina Foundation.
For more information on this project of the Bachelor of Business Administration, please contact Chris Jaeger at 753-3245 (local 2844) or jaegerc@viu.ca
Tags: In the Community
