Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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.

Kissing Frogs: The Challenges Of Becoming A Successful Entrepreneur, George Dierberger, Marc Isaacson, Cory Erickson, Thomas P. Dierberger

Faculty Authored Articles

“Kissing Frogs: The challenges of becoming a successful entrepreneur” explores the difficulties of creating, sustaining and succeeding as a business owner. This research is supplemented with data from a national survey to entrepreneurs (355) through Qualtrics, a global research organization. The respondents represented 42 states from a diverse group of self-identified entrepreneurs from a variety of industries.

To summarize, the paper will analyze the following topics in detail:

1. The importance of the mission and vision for the organization
2. The motivation for starting the business
3. The inspiration for the business idea
4. The importance of perseverance

Thinking And Designing With Design Thinking, Ahmet Can Ozcan, Yasuko Takayama

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

Design Thinking is a popular phrase especially for the last ten years penetrating into the discourse of management and design, business and academia in many ways. The contributions in the form of articles, commentaries and reviews in this MGDR Design Thinking Special Issue show us the examples, how and where we can use Design Thinking especially as an integral part of the design process. The area of design is expanding in diverse ways lately and sometimes it is causing the confusion such as Design Thinking is either a magical design tool, or another buzzword destined to go extinct after inevitable …

Exploring The Strategies For Sustaining Small- To Medium-Scale Enterprises, Kingsley Onochie Umadia

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The lack of development and the continued survival of small- to medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) poses a challenge to SME practices in Nigeria. Using sustainability theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the strategies that leaders use in sustaining SMEs in Lekki, Lagos, Nigeria. Ten SME leaders from the manufacturing sector, trading services, education, oil and gas service companies, and financial services sector provided comments during the interviews that addressed the research question. Data were analyzed by transcription, coding, categorizing and analysis of participants' responses using member checking. From the themes that emerged from the study, …

Competitive Strategies To Improve Small And Medium Enterprise Sales, Adeola Oluwakemi Ogunyemi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractSmall and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the mainstay of both developed and developing countries by contributing to employment, revenue, and value added. SMEs, however, are not often able to grow because of a lack of appropriate growth strategies. Grounded in Porter’s dynamic theory of strategy, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies retail SME owners in Lagos, Nigeria, used to grow sales. The participants were a census of five retail SME business owners who successfully implemented strategies to grow sales. The data collection sources included semistructured interviews, direct observation, company documents, and reflective journals. Based …

Features Of Formation Of The Competitive Environment In Small Business In The Conditions Of Development Of Innovative Economy, Rano Sadikova Phd

The Light of Islam

In a market economy, small business is the leading sector that determines the rate of economic growth, the composition and quality of the gross national product. The development and expansion of the sphere of production and services of small businesses in the Republic will eventually lead to an increase in employment and the development of the country’s economy as a whole.

Further enhancement of the role of small business in the national economy and further improvement of its participation in economic growth largely depends on the state of the competitive environment in this area. It is connected with creation of …

The Prosperity Paradox, A Review, Ryan Stenquist

Marriott Student Review

No abstract provided.

Innovation Agents, Mirit Eyal-Cohen

Washington and Lee Law Review

The standard narrative of entrepreneurship is one of self-employed creative individuals working out of their garage or independently owned start-up companies. Intrapreneurship— where employees are responsible for being alert to new opportunities inside firms—is another model for developing innovations. Relatively little is known, however, about the latter process through which large, complex firms engage in groundbreaking corporate entrepreneurship.

This Article’s focus is on these types of innovation agents. It provides a thorough account of the positive and negative spillovers of intrapreneurial firms while making the following key points: First, intrapreneurial companies utilize their economies of scale, scope, and age to …

How Ties With Family Members Influence Professionals' Creativity In Family Businesses: The Role Of Hive Effect And Trust, Rameshwari Ramachandra

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Many Asian enterprises are family businesses. In recent years, there has been a growing body of research on creativity in Asian firms, but few studies on the creativity of the professionals working in Asian family businesses. Given the importance of creativity in family businesses for their continued success, I examined how a professional’s ties to family members in a family business influenced their creativity. I proposed that the number of family members in a professional’s network would positively predict the professional’s creativity, and that this effect would be mediated by the family members’ affective and cognitive trust in the professional. …

Innovate Within Product Lines Or Outside Of Them? An Ethnographic Study Of Corporate Innovation In A Corporate Venture Makerspace., Cole Joseph Crider

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Organizational forms firms use for innovating include R&D departments, corporate venturing, and open innovation. This dissertation examines a new form for corporate innovation—the corporate venture makerspace. Makerspaces are “shared production facilities,” and scholars suggest they are environments in which to create; yet few firms have adopted them as a means to innovate. This dissertation is an ethnographic study in which I examine why a large corporation with active R&D centers and limited resources also has a corporate venture makerspace as a secondary innovation mechanism when both organizations serve the same overarching function: explorative learning activities intended to generate innovative …

Traits And Trends Of Social Entrepreneurship/ Innovation Leaders, Heet Ghodasara, Juanie Walker

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

The purpose of this study was to examine qualifications, characteristics, successes and motivations among leading social entrepreneurs in not-for-profit or for-profit organizations. Based on an interview guide developed by Dr. Juanie Walker and Heet Ghodasara, Ghodasara conducted interviews with 20 leaders of social entrepreneurship/innovation strategically located in Washington, D.C. Thematic analysis of interview transcripts revealed traits of successful organizations and individuals supported by provocative quotes. Themes of successful organizations include system disruptions, mutual investment, broad network and founder obsolescence. Individual themes include traits such as self efficacy, humility, grit and perseverance as well as imperatives to Get Dirty but Clean …

Entrepreneurship In Silicon Valley: The Road To Sustainable Prosperity, June Y. Lee

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Strategy

No abstract provided.

Business Model Innovation: A Review And Research Agenda, Boumediene Ramdani, Ahmed Binsaif, Elias Boukrami

New England Journal of Entrepreneurship

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to review and synthesise the recent advancements in the business model literature and explore how firms approach business model innovation. Design/methodology/approach – A systematic review of business model innovation literature was carried out by analysing 219 papers published between 2010 and 2016. Findings – Evidence reviewed suggests that rather than taking either an evolutionary process of continuous revision, adaptation and fine-tuning of the existing business model or a revolutionary process of replacing the existing business model, firms can explore alternative business models through experimentation, open and disruptive innovations. It was also found …

Editorial: Entrepreneurship And Innovation In A Global Context, Chun (Grace) Guo, Crystal X. Jiang

New England Journal of Entrepreneurship

Ever since Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, the world is revolutionized in ways of communications and social networking. Now technology advancement drives transformation around the world with fastened speed of globalization, allowing more companies achieving globalization and recognize cross-cultural, cross-national, cross-disciplinary opportunities to create new value-added activities. Technology advancement such as the fourth industrial revolution will inevitably transform the ways in which we live, work and interact with one another. As such, we need to embrace technology changes and examine the evolving domain of international entrepreneurship (IE) research and identify where the gaps are in …