UCLA kicks off Entrepreneur Week

The first Entrepreneurship Week at UCLA, the result of a collaboration between two organizations in the UCLA Anderson School of Management, will begin Saturday and last until Friday, Feb. 29.

The Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and the graduate student-led Entrepreneur Association worked together to plan the event.

Entrepreneurship Week is a nationally recognized program. Last year, the first nationally recognized Entrepreneurship Week had 3,700 events throughout the 50 states.

“UCLA Anderson is very active in entrepreneurship, but we wanted to celebrate entrepreneurship across campus, with many more people in different disciplines,” said Holly Han, director of Special Projects for Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

Organizers have recruited speakers from a variety of fields, such as the founders of Legal Zoom, an online legal document preparation service, and Dr. Susan Love, who will speak about entrepreneurship within the medical field. In addition, the UCLA Graduate School of Education will host a panel on charter schools.

Describing the need to involve multiple disciplines, Aisha Ali, a graduate student at Anderson and a member of the Entrepreneur Association, said “entrepreneurship is not just a noun; it’s a verb, it’s a way of thinking, it’s a mind set.”

Ali initially presented the idea of an Entrepreneurship Week to the Entrepreneur Association.

“These speakers took a chance and thought about what they were passionate about within their industries and took a different approach, which led them to do great things, and that is inspiring,” Ali said.

In selecting speakers, the organizers were looking to find individuals that students would find interesting, such as Brett Brewer, the co-founder of MySpace, who will be holding a lecture and a question-and-answer session.

In addition to incorporating speakers from multiple fields, particularly those that would be of interest to students, the organizers were looking for speakers who have ties to UCLA, Ali said.

Five of the speakers are alumni, including Brewer, who graduated from UCLA in 1996 with a B.A. in business economics. The two founders of Legal Zoom graduated from the law school.

This year, Entrepreneurship Week will also incorporate the Project ECHO Business Plan Competition for high school students.

The competition is a collaboration between the Entrepreneur Association at the Anderson School and Project ECHO, an organization that provides business education to students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Graduate students from UCLA Anderson mentor high school students who are taking business management entrepreneurship classes, said Anita Kemp, a teacher at Santa Monica High School.

The first part of the competition is submitting a business plan prior to the competition, and the second is presenting the business plan, said Kemp.

She and another teacher at the high school have helped their students win three of the four years that the competition has been in existence.

Kemp said the competition is divided into three categories: existing businesses, new businesses and new business concepts.

“We hope Entrepreneurship Week at UCLA inspires more students to pursue entrepreneurship in their own fields, as well as increases collaboration between the seven schools at UCLA,” said Anil Tammineedi, president of the Entrepreneur Association.

“We hope that UCLA becomes known for it’s entrepreneurial spirit by helping more successful companies come out of UCLA,” Tammineedi said.

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