Mariotti (right) with BESA winners

Steve Mariotti, Kaizen interviewee and founder of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), wrote about his experiences with young entrepreneurs at the Bright China Entrepreneurial Spirit Award (BESA) ceremony. “…These young people would most likely end up as low-income workers in factories. Through the NFTE/Bright China program, they were inspired to start their own businesses,” Mariotti said.

Read more here.

Related: “China’s Century?” by Michael Beckley [PDF].

Read Paul M. Barrett’s Bloomberg article here.

In 2009 CEE won the Templeton Freedom Award. The award was for our creative course development, and it was the result of a competition with over 100 entries from centers, institutes, and think tanks around the world.

CEE has developed original courses in Entrepreneurship and Ethics and Capitalism and the Modern World , and we have reached a growing audience of college students, high school students, professors, and readers of our Kaizen newsletter both in print and online.

We are proud of what we have accomplished in our first four years, and I hope you will support us so that we can both continue and increase our efforts.

Please check out our Accomplishments List for our first four years — but there are two items I would like to highlight: Shawn Klein, having completed and defended his dissertation this year, is now Dr. Shawn Klein; and I won our college’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

CEE was launched in 2007 with a grant from the BB&T Charitable Foundation. That grant expires this coming year; hence our current fundraising efforts to ensure our ongoing progress.

Please look over the links to samples of our work and consider making a donation. And if you have any questions about our plans for the future, please feel welcome to contact me.

All the very best for the holiday season,
Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D.

Professor of Philosophy
Executive Director, Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship

Email:  SHicks@Rockford.edu
Web:  www.StephenHicks.org
www.EthicsandEntrepreneurship.org

In an upcoming issue of Kaizen we interview Steve Mariotti, founder and CEO of the impressive Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Several of the young entrepreneurs in Ten9Eight are graduates of NFTE.

The abstract:

“Entrepreneurship is increasingly studied as a fundamental and foundational economic phenomenon. It has, however, received less attention as an ethical phenomenon. Much contemporary business ethics assumes its core application purposes to be (1) to stop predatory business practices and (2) to encourage philanthropy and charity by business. Certainly predation is immoral and charity has a place in ethics, but neither should be the first concerns of ethics. Instead, business ethics should make fundamental the values and virtues of entrepreneurs — i.e., those self-responsible and productive individuals who create value and trade with others to win-win advantage.”