After almost two months of hard work, the Entrepreneurship Club won first place at the 2012 Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization Startup Simulation Challenge. The team that participated and won was comprised of students Michael Anadiotis, Chris Carpenter, Brown Charite, Lazar Anderson, and Mark Lombardi-Nelson.
The club, which is focused on learning in entrepreneurship, helps students to promote their ideas through lectures, guest speakers, and community projects. A national competition like the Startup Simulation Challenge gives students a chance to learn as a team, while also letting them expose their ideas.
Team member Michael Anadiotis is proud of how successful his team was and glad he got to be a part of the experience.
“We were constantly challenged into thinking of new and different ways to go about solving the many problems we faced,” he said. “We had worked different times in the club on breaking into small groups and exchanging ideas, and then having each other build off one another’s to inspire new ideas.”
The CEO network has chapters at over 240 schools around the country. At the competition, 26 teams competed with a final round of eight teams from different schools. The prize for first place was $1,000 for the club, and the top three winning teams gain mentors from some of the entrepreneurs in the CEO network.
Along with USFSP in first place, Louisiana State University came in second, with the University of Nebraska-Omaha in third place. The project lasted from February to the end of March when the challenge was held. The competition was fun and exciting, and also a challenge, Anadiotis said. It let them practice their entrepreneurial skills as a team and gain experience that will help them in the real world.
“While we wanted to compare the simulation to real life data, we had to constantly tell ourselves that this is a simulation and we are only competing with the other teams,” Anadiotis said. “Our biggest competitor was ourselves.”
