Project FEW- Future Entrepreneurs of the World

Project Future Entrepreneurs of the World, FEW, is an integral part of SIFE, aiming to inspire entrepreneurship on Carnegie Mellon University’s campus and at high schools in Pittsburgh. Entrepreneurship is a very important aspect of business that is often overlooked. The United States has historically understood the importance of fostering entrepreneurship. Yet with this great success, a corporate world was born. Today, being an entrepreneur is often an ignored option; it seems infeasible to our generation.

Project FEW first breaks this mold by holding a case competition on Carnegie Mellon's campus. Groups of students come up with business ideas and then pitch these ideas to a panel of business faculty. The winning team is then given support both in start up costs and mentorship.  In prior years this competition, formally Project Build Your Own Business, has had great success inspiring innovation amongst the student body. But Carnegie Mellon makes up only a small portion of the Pittsburgh student population.

With numerous high schools in the Pittsburgh community, project FEW takes the idea of spreading entrepreneurship a step further. This portion of FEW, formally known as Future Entrepreneurs, has grown due to influences from entrepreneurship classes at Carnegie Mellon. To further inspire high school students, we are giving each school’s students participating in FEW a start up budget for any business they would like to take on. After being given a lecture on basic entrepreneurship advice, the students will be free to start a business in their local community or school of their choosing. After three months, each school’s group will come to Carnegie Mellon to present their projects and a winning team will be chosen.

As mentioned above, these two goals of Project FEW in previous years were realized by two different projects. By incorporating them into one, we hope this year to synergize the resources each project brought to the table. Look for project FEW in the coming weeks both in fundraising and marketing the idea competition on CMU’s campus. We will be selling scarves and food as well as registering people interested in participating in the competition set to be held January 29th, 2010 (Registration deadline is January 14th, 2010). 

-Richard Kucera, Project Leader: FEW