CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE 2008 CEO NATIONAL CONFERENCE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY TRACK SESSIONS!
The 2008 Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization (CEO) National Conference was held November 6-8, 2008. One of the premier events for young entrepreneurs, this year’s conference drew over 1500 undergraduates from multiple countries. Guests attended workshops, participated in competitions, and networked with successful entrepreneurs. The conference was a great success – IEA members wrote in their post-conference evaluation reports that they “benefited greatly from networking at the conference” and were “really glad that [they] got to...absorb information from the intelligent and talented speakers.”
Forty six IIT students attended this year’s conference; all of them received full or partial scholarships from the Entrepreneurship Program at IIT and The Coleman Foundation to offset registration expenses. As in previous years, the Entrepreneurship Program at IIT created and sponsored a two-day dedicated science and technology track. This track was one of the many highlights of the conference and featured speakers from companies including Grubhub.com, Hunter Douglas, Inc., and Atlas Material Testing Technology, LLC. Topics covered included such diverse areas as risk management, raising capital, bootstrapping, and intellectual property.
Many members of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Academy served as session moderators, and volunteers. IEA members Ty Caughell, Purvag Patel, Avelo Roy, and Ed Suda participated in the CEO elevator pitch competition.
Additionally, the IEA’s onsite business card creation booth was a hotbed of activity during the conference as students, faculty, and entrepreneurs either realized that they had forgotten their business cards or ran out of cards during one of the numerous networking breaks. This example of entrepreneurial thinking earned the IEA the CEO’s ‘Best Chapter Business’ award – an impressive feat given that there are over 135 active CEO chapters. This is the second award that the IEA has won in as many years; at the 2007 CEO conference, the IEA was honored with the ‘Best Chapter E-Diffusion’ award for its efforts in promoting entrepreneurship to non-business students.
The Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization provides young entrepreneurs with networking opportunities, chapter activities, and a national conference to help them start their own businesses. The mission of CEO is to inform, support, and inspire college students to be entrepreneurial and seek opportunity through enterprise creation.