In “Teaching Capitalism in the Last Days of the USSR,” Steve Mariotti discusses his experience teaching capitalism and business to students in the final days of the USSR as it was changing to Russia.
Mariotti is a Kaizen interviewee and the founder of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). Before NFTE, Mariotti was a successful entrepreneur and a teacher in some of New York’s most challenging schools. Because of his innovative methods for teaching business concepts, Mariotti was named Teacher of the Year for New York State in 1988.
On Friday, April 15 Rock Valley College will host the Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour, which takes place from 3:00 to 7:00 p.m. in the Student Center Atrium. The RVC website states: “The Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour – the first ever collegiate entrepreneur tour – includes keynotes, exhibits, workshops, and question-and-answer sessions with young entrepreneurs. Students will brainstorm with business professionals and meet like-minded students through networking events.” CEE’s Executive Director, Dr. Stephen Hicks, will be a panelist at the event.
Global Entrepreneurship Week starts November 16. From the website: “For one week, millions of young people around the world join a growing movement of entrepreneurial people, to generate new ideas and to seek better ways of doing things. Countries across six continents come together to celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week, an initiative to inspire young people to embrace innovation, imagination and creativity. To think big. To turn their ideas into reality. To make their mark.”
FUTURALLIA 2011 will take place in Kansas City from May 18-20. From the event’s website: “Over two days, this international business development event will allow business leaders to have up to 16 personalized and pre-scheduled, 30-minute, face-to-face meetings with partners of their choice. FUTURALLIA is a springboard toward making new international partnerships, in addition to informal meetings in a professional and friendly environment.”
An article in New York Daily News covers the increasing demand for the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s (NFTE) courses in our faltering economy. NFTE was founded by Kaizen interviewee Steve Mariotti, who states, “Kids are aware of how fragile a job is and they begin to think about how they could create a job if they had to.” The article also profiles several young graduates of the program who have become entrepreneurial success stories.
Shown above, NFTE graduate Steve Gordon, 18-year-old founder of TatooID.
Venture capitalist Kevin O’Connor, interviewed in the April 2009 issue [PDF] of Kaizen, is now co-founder and CEO of FindTheBest.com. FindTheBest, as described by Mr. O’Connor, “was created out of my desire to organize part of the Internet, filter out the excessive junk and present information in a simple, comparable way.”
He explains further: “I could find endless amounts of information on any subject but when I had a complicated decision to make, I found myself wasting hours, or even days, compiling information I could compare. Or, I found sites offering their “top 10” recommendations, only to discover they were secretly getting “kickbacks” from the sites they were recommending.”
His solution, FindTheBest, is now in beta version. It allows the user to compare search results (similarly to travel websites like Expedia), and to narrow down the results by various criteria (much like browsing Amazon). Like Wikipedia, users can also contribute to the site, updating existing areas or creating new listings in which they have expertise.
