Southeast hosted the Innovation Challenge to inspire students during Global Entrepreneurship Week

Students, faculty and community members gathered in Southeast Missouri State University’s Academic Hall Auditorium on Nov. 16 in celebration of Global Entrepreneurship Week.

The event was held from 12:00-1:15 pm allowing a large number of students to attend.

The 65 minute program was split into two sections beginning with the Southeast Innovation Challenge.

In this challenge, students are grouped into teams of two or three and are given the task of researching and proposing an innovative program or service.

“Our goal as an entrepreneurship faculty was to challenge students to create something that actually matters,” assistant professor in the Department of Management and Marketing Dena Hale said. Out of the 27 teams that entered, the top three presented their ideas to the audience in hopes of winning the people’s choice award.

The first group’s presentation, “Redhawk Rewards,” focused primarily on raising attendance numbers and getting students more involved in extracurricular activities at Southeast. The group said they believe their innovative program could unify all clubs at Southeast for a common cause.

The second group’s idea, “International Buddy Program,” was to create a foreign exchange program where an American student would be paired with a foreign student in a buddy system.

These “buddies” would be generated through an online questionnaire and then matched based on the similarity of the individuals. American students would in turn have the chance to study abroad in the country native to their buddy. The group discussed their personal ties to the issue seeing as they are all international students themselves.

The final group’s presentation, “Omega Transport,” had more of a solution-based focus. The group identified that parking is a serious issue on this campus, so they developed a system through the university that would allow students to rent scooters and bikes. This would reduce the congestion while allowing parking spaces to be used for multiple scooters or bikes.

The second portion of the program featured Southeast alumni guest speaker Gary Kellmann. He cultivated the audience by sharing his own personal experiences through the business industry.

“Thankfully we were able to find something that makes sense in our classes and programs and really fits in well with the new direction of the university,” Hale said.

The event ended with announcing the International Buddy Program as the winners of this year’s People’s choice award.