Spotlight
Emerging Leader
| USFSP
USF St. Petersburg’s Entrepreneurship Program has been named the Outstanding Emerging Entrepreneurship Program in the United States. The USFSP program took top honors at the annual United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship conference in San Francisco, edging out finalists University of Maryland and the University of Rochester.
The award comes less than three years after the program was founded and just a year-and-a-half since classes began. In 2012, students in the Entrepreneurship Club won the prestigious CEO Startup Simulation Challenge.
The United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship is the world’s largest independent organization dedicated to advancing entrepreneurship. The award honors an emerging program that “reflects innovation, quality, potential viability, comprehensiveness, depth of support, sustainability and impact.”
The Entrepreneurship Program includes innovative curriculum that crosses all disciplines and colleges at USFSP, a small-business development center, a business accelerator called Gazelle Lab, the Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship, an advisory board of experienced entrepreneurs and extensive community outreach that brings dozens of Tampa Bay business leaders into classrooms to interact with students.
The program also published “Tampa Bay’s 6/20 Plan” that called for the creation of an entrepreneurial ecosystem to encourage collaboration among Tampa Bay entrepreneurs and the organizations that support them.
“This provides needed validation for us and the community that we have accomplished a lot here in a short period of time,” says program director William Jackson. “The success can be attributed to the hard work of everyone involved in the program.”