Chamber of Commerce commentary by Danielle Davenport: Chamber launching new entrepreneurship program

NextGen Program will prepare youth with critical skills needed for innovation and leadership

By Danielle Davenport.
Teenagers in the Morgan Hill area with a penchant for innovative business ideas now have an opportunity to open the door into a real-life business world. The Morgan Hill Chamber of Commerce is launching a new program for imaginative middle and high school students seeking to transform their ideas into a bona fide enterprise. Starting Sept. 2, the Next Generation Innovators & Entrepreneurs Program (NextGen Program) will accept applications for the inaugural fall 2013 class of up to 15 students.
As a co-founder of South Valley Angels, a local venture capital group for our region, I will lead this exciting new program. To build up NextGen, I will pull from my business seed and development experience to launch this initiative with a top-notch team of organizers and a solid curriculum that teaches teenagers basic business-building skills.
Coaching entrepreneurs is a skill. Entrepreneurs are a unique breed. They need to be humble and able to fail, learn, compose and reinvent.
The Chamber of Commerce and I believe this new program will prepare our youth with the critical skills necessary for innovation and leadership. And completing this course will undoubtedly increase a teenage student’s chances of getting into a good university and enable them to create their own job after graduation.
The NextGen program is modeled after several successful entrepreneurial courses and programs located here in the Silicon Valley. Many universities are changing the way they teach the traditional business courses.
It’s difficult to teach entrepreneurship when schools are only focused on business plans. But increasingly, universities are devising innovative classes that emphasize experience over study and use moments in distress, messiness, and unpredictability. Academic concepts like effectuation — which focuses on ingenuity and quick course correction – and a new, dynamic approach to business modeling are among the ideas professors are now employing to teach our youth. The Chamber’s NextGen program will use these concepts and real life lessons to produce savvy young entrepreneurs.
The NextGen program is designed around a series of business world obstacles and will help students enrolled in the program learn how to address them. There are many tools needed to launch a business and our program is focused on their development.
More importantly, students will be taught many key entrepreneurial attributes through our interactive and iterative approach, which is designed to develop the innovation mindset in NextGen students.
Starting with a business idea, students will learn how to create a standard business plan with its necessary components to help focus their efforts on effective results. The focus of the program is on delivering and assessing one another’s elevator pitch, functional prototype, market viability, and revenue projections.
The students will also learn how to create an investor pitch and address the investor’s questions and most importantly their anticipated returns. At any time during the course, students can choose to abandon their idea and join with another student to create a team of entrepreneurs.
At the end of the course, students pitch their ideas to a panel of accredited investors. The top innovations get funded. The funds are used to launch the students’ own legally-viable companies. Our hope is that graduates will leave the program with an “innovate attitude” and maybe even a business of their own.
NextGen is a community project and is currently seeking instructors, interns, sponsors, hosts and judges/investors.
This six-month program will be delivered by successful entrepreneurs and dynamic guest speakers from the local business community. It will also include a panel of accredited investors.
Most of the course work will be in a classroom, but there will also be exciting behind-the-scenes trips to local companies and opportunities to view a real investor pitch.
This engaging program will empower students to build their own future by leveraging their creativity and taking their insights to innovation.

If you are interested in enrolling or being involved, please go to the Facebook page at Morgan Hill Next Generation Innovators & Entrepreneurs or email us [email protected] for an application packet or more information.