Muskegon needs entrepreneurs — and Suzanne Velarde thinks she just might have found a way to spark their interest.

She's helped create what is being called Muskegon's first “elevator pitch competition,” an event that gives students — both from high school and college — 90 seconds to pitch a business proposal. The idea is to replicate an elevator ride between an entrepreneur and an investor.

Original Source / Full Article: http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2011/10/muskegon_area_stude...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—More than 140 students on 80 teams are competing in the first annual China Business Challenge at the University of Michigan, organizers say.

A total $6,000 in prize money is offered to the top four teams with the best business models for booming China, which many economists believe will soon overtake the United States as the world's biggest economy.

"China is such a growing market, and entrepreneurs should be identifying opportunities in growing areas of the world," said Cameron Smith, an MBA student and an organizer of the competition.

October 12, 2011—

Start-ups are not easy to start, according to experts visiting campus, and success often happens through failure.

“If you are going to fail, fail fast,” said Paul Fulton ’84, a Silicon Valley investor and consultant, at Tuesday’s Entrepreneur 2.0 panel at Michigan Technological University. “You learn from your mistakes, and it’s like skiing at Mont Ripley, which is why I came to Tech. If you don’t push yourself to the edges, you don’t know how far you can go.”

TRAVERSE CITY – A free, new, locally-produced calendar with photographs of pet dogs and cats will be distributed in the area later this year, thanks to the efforts of a dedicated group of Northwestern Michigan College students.

With a goal of raising funds and awareness for the Cherryland Humane Society (CHS), five students in the college’s new Entrepreneurship Marketing and Finance class decided to assist the nonprofit organization by making the calendar their pet project this semester.