Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons^™

Cares Act 2020: Unemployment Insurance And Farmer/Ranchers, Robert Tigner

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

First paragraph:

Generally, unemployment insurance across the country is managed by state government. Each has different rules, with oversight by the US Department of Labor. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) Act made changes to the unemployment coverage for workers and appropriated funds for the changes. The act tasked the Labor Department with writing rules for the changes and it has issued an Unemployment Insurance Letter — UL No. 16-20 — that begins the rulemaking process. This guidance will then be used by Nebraska to implement the CARES Act. This article reviews what is known now with …

Small Business, Big Change: How Start-Ups Positively Affect The Community Around Them, Kaylee Spears

Senior Honors Theses

Usual measures of success refer commonly to financial means. In a world where success is synonymous with money, small businesses may appear to fall short of the standard. However, these measures do not comprehensively translate to small, family, or start-up companies. Incorrect measurements of success can skew the data when it comes to start-ups and family businesses, but new standards can bring to light just how large an impact small business can make. This thesis seeks to identify better ways to measure success for small businesses through non-financial means, research current examples for relevance, and provide insight for start-ups on …

[Nebraska] Innovation Studio Coordinating Army Of Makers For Ppe [Personal Protective Equipment] Projects, Deann Gayman

Nebraska Innovation Studio

Nebraska Innovation Studio coordinating army of makers for personal protective equipment (PPE) projects.

While assembling up to 1,800 face shields (https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/nebraska-umakers- step-up-to-equip-healers/) a day, staff at Nebraska Innovation Studio (https://innovationstudio.unl.edu/nebraska-innovation-studio) are also assisting coordination of an army of community workers and volunteers to make more personal protective equipment, namely gowns for first responders and fabric masks for essential workers.

After the success of the face shield project, Innovation Studio staff started fielding requests for new projects — chief among them: protective gowns for first responders.

“The Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department heard about the (face shield) project …

Nebraska U Makers Step Up To Equip Healers, Deann Gayman

Nebraska Innovation Studio

Nebraska University makers step up to equip healers.

Nebraska Innovation Studio is closed to the public, but its leaders and members are working around the clock to produce face shields for hospitals across the state.

Personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages have been well documented throughout the United States as COVID-19 has spread rapidly. That trend is also hitting Nebraska, where hospitals arestarting to run short.

Through 3-D printing and partnerships with local businesses and individuals, a team at Nebraska Innovation Studio and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln has already manufactured more than 150 face shields for the University of Nebraska Medical …

Wesolv: Mba Job Analysis, Xiaofan Li '21

2020 Intern Reports

WeSolv is a startup that focuses on bringing the most qualified candidates to prospective hiring companies by designing and utilizing case challenges to accurately assess the candidates’ skill sets. The case challenges consist of several activities (presentations, research, etc.) that the candidates must execute, which measure their fit for potential jobs. For the past academic year, the company has provided information on how to obtain insight on their system metrics and to better understand the process of choosing their assessing skills. Since desired skills in candidates are fluid throughout time, the company needs to constantly ensure that they have the …

Developing An Accurate Method And Algorithm To Identify And Match Tutors With Their Respective Students, According To Intellectual Level And Teaching Style, Vasanth Ramesh

2020 Intern Reports

Course Stars, LLC is a quality tutoring service focused on helping high school college students excel in specific college courses, or standardized tests, through the help of experienced tutors (who have taken those specialized courses before). The unique aspect of Course Stars is that our tutors are all specialized in their own college courses and have their strengths in specific standardized testing aspects. The focus of our business project for Course Stars is to create a method for analyzing and matching a specific student in need of tutoring with their respective tutor. This matchmaking will be based on the student’s …

Using Social Media As A Marketing Tool For Scholarships, Brooke Bolsinger '21

2020 Intern Reports

Scholarship Assistance Fund is a nonprofit organization with the mission of supporting local students (Arlington Heights, Buffalo Grove, Mt. Prospect, Prospect Heights, and Wheeling) that aim to achieve a higher education. The focus of the business project involved a few different parts, primarily being social media management, but also included other graphic design projects, website management, and grant research. Throughout the six months of the internship program, Scholarship Assistance Fund began to utilize social media in their process of marketing to students, on top of their outreach to schools and printing of physical posters. Along with this, they began to …

Dental Practice Success Vol. 7 No. 1, American Dental Association, Publishing Division

Dental Practice Success

No abstract provided.

Team Creation Methods In Practice: Understanding The Potential Effects Of Nonverbal Communication In The Leadership Of Team Formation, Troy Allen Robertson

Dissertations

Teams require leadership, even if they are self-managed. The group of individuals who make up a team must be gathered in some form or another. For self managed teams to function successfully, the first step is the process of creating the team. Many aspects may factor into the creation process. Often time is of the essence and methods to quickly assess and form teams show merit. First impressions in general are based largely on nonverbal communication. The focus of this mixed-methods concurrent embedded study is to analyze the potential effects of nonverbal communication on influencing team creation. A group of …

Safestart: Simplifying Technology For Seniors, Melissa Myint '21

2020 Intern Reports

Our project is nonprofit and aims to help seniors understand how to use technology in their daily lives by creating videos that are simple and easy to follow.As in this day and age seniors are afraid to use their smart devices other than the basic call function which can prevent seniors from receiving the benefits associated with the use of apps that could track their medication, allow them to video call, and etc. These seniors are therefore being left out from the increasing digital society. In order to accomplish this goal, we are creating instructional videos on the uses of …

Civicly Envolved Intership: Working On The Candidate Profile Screen, Patrick Hultquist '21

2020 Intern Reports

Going into any situation, I think I’m always a little overconfident. This was no exception. I had previously made an (unimpressive) app, had talked to people before, and knew how to work with a team; so this would be all the same, right?I thought going into this that I would probably do something around 80%working and 20% learning. The very first day I realized how wrong I was. I learned that in this internship, I was going to, well, learn. At first, I felt kind of bad; I mean, I knew barely anything and had to be taught from the …

Web Developing With Block Bins, Rajan Savani '21

2020 Intern Reports

Block Bins is a compost collection company based in Chicago that creates food scrap drop off points using shared bins, providing an inexpensive solution to people who want to compost their food scrap. This service is enabled with a website, automation, and data collection & analysis, which were developed and improved over the course of this internship. The goal of this project was to improve the current website with an updated front-end that uses modern web frameworks and a revised back-end that is better tailored to the Block Binsuse-case. These improvements would reduce reliance on third-party software and developers, and …

Venture Capital And Marketing With K8 Ventures, Rosario Picone '21

2020 Intern Reports

K8 Ventures is a venture builder studio, with investments in a diverse range of industries. K8’sgreatest skill is developing companies in-house, starting at Stage 1, what they call “an idea written on a napkin,” to Stage 5, which is a successful business already established in the market. Because K8 is investing in early-stage companies, they typically are able to take a larger share of equity in their developing companies. This allows them to take a managerial role in the company, thus taking some of the traditional risks out of venture capital. Over the past year with K8, they have provided …

Easy-To-Use Augmented Reality In The Mobile Industry: An Internship Experience, Abhi Vinnakota '21

2020 Intern Reports

This report details the work and research I have completed over the past few months with BUNDLAR. This company is a startup located in startup incubator 1871. BUNDLAR is currently developing their augmented reality mobile app that will launch in the near future. Over my time with them, I helped with market research. My research was focused on the Augmented Reality industry and performing competitive analysis on other AR companies. With this research, I was able to provide BUNDLAR with valuable recommendations and insights that helped shape their development around the target audience and industry. In addition, I also focused …

My Internship With The State Representative: An Overview, Nathan Tamez '21

2020 Intern Reports

My name is Nathan Tamez, and I am a Junior (‘21) at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. I am currently thinking of going into Engineering (most likely Automotive or Mechanical). Honestly, I did not know what to expect when I signed up for the internship program, but what I heard from friends and the internship coordinators reassured me that there would be many opportunities to meet people with experience and to expand my network. Just as I expected, I was able to meet plenty of people, and even establish a connection with the Aurora Collective,a conjunction of businesses based …

Safestart: Simplifying Technology For Seniors, Savannah Pagan '20

2020 Intern Reports

Within our project, my partner and I aimed to fulfill the goal of simplifying technology usage for senior citizens. Seniors are often left behind in terms of technology, often because no one has taken the time to sit down with them and explain how to utilize their devices. There is a need to be technologically fit in today’s society, and by educating older generations on these topics, we can move them forward into this technological age. We went about addressing this problem by creating a series of interactive, informational videos that go over the basics of everyday technology, such as …

Venture Capital And Marketing With K8 Ventures, Simone-Nicole Angelov '21

2020 Intern Reports

I completed an internship with K8 Ventures, a Venture Builder Studio in Chicago. I had the opportunity to work on projects for K8 as well as P3rceive, one of their major portfolio companies. My time with the company has allowed me to learn about a variety of business procedures, techniques, and terminology, in addition to what it takes to develop a company.

Dealerfox Data Visualization, Zoe Berthold '21

2020 Intern Reports

Dealer Fox is a start-up that provides data visualization and consulting for advertisements of car dealerships online to help increase efficiency of sales. The business project was to streamline the process of data visualization, from collecting the data to presenting it using Infogram.

Marketing Internship, Alejandro Carrillo '21

2020 Intern Reports

Qooley is a company focused on providing the best travel experience for tourists by connecting them with knowledgeable locals in the area they are visiting. The purpose of this business project was to help Qooley develop their marketing techniques and to increase the number of people that viewed their product. The business project included creating a pipeline of possible partners, finding out which categories are the most liked, creating social media content,and analyzing the Qooley website. Over the course of six months, the company provided portunities to gain experience in market research, website design, and composition, and how to connect …

Marketing With Sat Analysis, Aryan Gandhi '21

2020 Intern Reports

As an intern at Coursetars, I was introduced into the tutoring industry. I had never received or given tutoring before, unless it was my little sister, so it was very informative to see how these companies worked. One thing that I worked on which is standard amongst most tutoring companies is recruitment for tutors. Coursestars was trying to expand more into tutoring college students, and to do so, I reached out to contacts at UIUC to spread the word and put up fliers. From an industry standpoint, tutoring college students is one of the biggest markets out there, simply because …

Wesolv: Business Project Final Report, Doreen Xiao '20

2020 Intern Reports

WeSolv is an innovative technology platform with a driven mission to advance equity in the career hiring field. WeSolv works with companies from Salesforce to Pinterest, to identify key skills companies prioritize for certain positions to create personalized Case Challenges for MBA students. These Case Challenges measure presentations, deliverables, and teamwork to see how students would actually perform in the job to ultimately reduce bias in the hiring process.

Business Project Final Report, Elasia Rodriguez '21

2020 Intern Reports

The STEM Pathways Project Team and I work with the Center for Innovation and Inquiry (IN2) on implementing the College and Career Pathway Endorsements program (CCPE)through the Post-Secondary Workforce Readiness Act (PWRA or PWR act). I am the lead intern, Elasia Rodriguez, and the rest of the project team consists of Gloria Wang, Jaelynn Abdullah,and Aryan Gandhi under the advisory of Betty Hart. The focus of the project is to assess IMSA’s courses and offerings and how they can assist students in college-readiness and prepare students for the future of work. The CCPE program is a planned high-school pathway that …

Medical Billing Application Development Project, Ji Yoon Lee '20

2020 Intern Reports

The following report gives a detailed description of the internship carried out by Ji Yoon Lee throughout the duration of the 2019-2020 internship cohort at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. The final product created, the process followed in order to create the product, as well as the research and methods are explained. The report documents the imitations and constraints encountered throughout the project creation and development duration. An inclusion of values, skills, and information resulting from the internship experience are detailed below as well as recommendations on how to improve the results for both the business and for future …

Building The Coursestars Brand, Melena Braggs '21

2020 Intern Reports

The main purpose of this project was to build the brand of Course Stars, a small tutoring business based in Illinois. This brand building was done through Facebook and Instagram, and the project lasted from November 2019 to March 2020. In that time, the analytics from Facebook and Instagram were tracked and analyzed. While there was a slight increase in the amount of interactions from the sites combined, there’s still few followers on Instagram. Marketing on social media is generally helpful, but in this project it did not make a large difference.

Permanent Equity: Successfully Finding And Buying A Small Business, Lewis Wang

Senior Theses

This thesis aims to build off the existing research on the advantages of permanent equity within the micro-cap market space. This strategy combines many advantages from private equity, venture capital, small-cap, and value / quality investing in order to generate a differentiated return. While the pros and cons of these various strategies have been explored by previous academic research, not much has been written on the actual implementation and choices practitioners must make when they decide how to deploy capital. In order to dive deeper into implementation, this thesis presents several anecdotes of various firms that invest in this space …

Analyzing Local Alcohol Vendor Inventory Management Strategy, Angelo J. Amore

Senior Theses

This paper attempts to analyze how local alcohol vendors maintain their inventory throughout the year in Columbia, attempting to manage factors such as the season, sporting events, and other public gatherings and events. The research question resulted in contacting over 30 local alcohol vendors in Columbia, to ask them questions regarding their strategy in alcohol inventory management. The responses to these questions were then used to organize the vendors into groups by whether or not they utilize a reorder point to purchase/brew alcohol, or if they utilize periodic ordering. The vendors were also asked to rank the seasons from most …

2020 Ijbe Front Matter

International Journal for Business Education

1. Editorial Board
2. Letter from International President
3. SIEC-ISBE International

Advancing U.S. Latino Entrepreneurship: A New National Economic Imperative, Marlene Orozco, Alfonso Morales, Michael J. Pisani, Jerry I. Porras

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Advancing U.S. Latino Entrepreneurship examines business formation and success among Latinos by identifying arrangements that enhance entrepreneurship and by understanding the sociopolitical contexts that shape entrepreneurial trajectories. While it is well known that Latinos make up one of the largest and fastest growing populations in the U.S., Latino-owned businesses are now outpacing this population growth and the startup business growth of all other demographic groups in the country.

The institutional arrangements shaping business formation are no level playing field. Minority entrepreneurs face racism and sexism, but structural barriers are not the only obstacles that matter; there are agentic barriers and …

Underwriting Crowdfunding, Darian M. Ibrahim

Faculty Publications

Crowdfunding has more in common with an initial public offering (IPO) than may be readily apparent. Both are coordinated sales of securities to public investors (in crowdfunding's case, the "crowd"). Both rely on disclosure to mitigate information asymmetries between a company and its investors. Yet IPOs protect investors better for two reasons. First, companies undertaking an IPO have significant track records to disclose, unlike nascent startups. Second, IPOs are underwritten, meaning a reputational intermediary vouches for them.

This Essay considers applying underwriting to Regulation Crowdfunding (Regulation CF) to allow crowdfunding to mimic an IPO. It tackles questions such as: Who …

Two Essays On Negotiations Between Entrepreneurs And Angel Investors, Aydin Selim Oksoy

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation has two essays examining negotiations between entrepreneurs and angel investors. In Essay 1, I study the dual roles of equity from the angel investor’s perspective, where the equity position sought in an embryonic firm creates two concerns. The first concern relates to the risks involved in generating returns from the initial capital investment. The second is a governance concern due to the challenges involved in managing future interactions between the firm and its environment. Because the angel investor is beholden to the entrepreneur for the proper execution of the embryonic firm’s strategy, this governance concern involves incentivizing the …