Mid-South Community College is working with Elevate Entrepreneurship Systems, an organization that develops youth entrepreneurs, to generate more excitement about new business creation.
With the help of NewME, a technology start-up accelerator/incubator, Elevate Entrepreneurship developed a smart phone application, makePAPER, that encourages student imagination, participation, and learning.
“The community college environment has been struggling with how to do a lot of what this technology can do,” said Matt Hampton who founded Elevate with his wife, Maria. “This new technology helps create a marketplace, a community, and an environment for students to be entrepreneurial.”
“For the last four or five years, Mid-South Community College has been the leader in looking at how to refine and test this. MSCC is like our Harvard, our testing ground for makePAPER .”
Mid-South has been involved in numerous efforts to encourage entrepreneurship in recent years.
“Small businesses created by entrepreneurially-minded individuals generate thousands of jobs each year, and those jobs are vital to our local, regional, and national economies,” said MSCC President Dr. Glen Fenter. “While we continue to build a world-class workforce in the hopes of attracting major employers to our area, we recognize the fact that most of the business in the United States is small business.”
“Our partnership with Elevate Entrepreneurship Systems is a perfect fit for what we have been trying to accomplish. It has great potential for maximizing our efforts to encourage and train people to start their own businesses.”
Hampton recently spent three days on the MSCC campus to sign up students for the program which features cash prizes for creative competitions with an entrepreneurial focus. He is working through and with the College’s Business Opportunity for Student Success (BOSS) club to generate interest.
“Matt’s passion and compassion is a winning combination for our Student Life Entrepreneur BOSS Club participants,” said Tony Wilson, MSCC Career Services and Student Activities coordinator.
“During the past four years, I have traveled to conferences and institutions across the state and country to witness Matt’s magic with engaging students and stakeholders in entrepreneur development. Matt is respected as a unique entrepreneur in these circles and is a ray of hope to our students.”
Hampton said the approach is relatively simply.
“We’re all about helping students learn how to make money,” he pointed out. “We decided to focus on what motivates students and young people and introduce that first. We always do some kind of competition and offer cash prizes because that gets students excited.”
Students interested in earning money for their ideas and projects must have an Instagram account and a smart phone. They can then access makePAPER.me to complete the registration process. After submitting a project, students receive their own unique URL and can then encourage friends, classmates, and relatives to “like” their work. The projects with the most “likes” wins.
“The technology is something students are familiar with, and it’s taking the fundamentals of what we do – which is motivating people with money – and getting them to do and try different things,” Hampton said.
“We intentionally made the process a little cumbersome so that if you want to compete, you have to figure out how to do things. The money motivates them to educate themselves in a lot of ways, and what the students learn is relevant to what they want to do. The process also creates a viral loop which we anticipate will motivate others to think, ‘What can I do in here to make money?’”
MSCC students who register with makePAPER will have the opportunity to compete in several different categories: poetry/performing arts, video clips (How MSCC has impacted my life), social impact (projects to improve communities), spoofs, digital design, and fashion design.
Specific competition opportunities for Mid-South students center around the BOSS Club: creating a unique rap or song, designing a T-shirt, and creating a promotional recruitment flyer for the organization. Prizes range from $50 to $150.
Prize money comes from program subscribers (schools, organizations, companies, and even parents) and goes on a “credit” card that winning students can use as needed.
Elevate Entrepreneurship Systems is partnering with NewME to create a nationwide network. The Hamptons participated in a “Pop-Up Accelerator” in Memphis and caught the eye of NewME founder Angela Benton. Maria Hampton has spent almost three months in San Francisco while working on the project.
“Our technical team is in Silicon Valley, but our plan is to build a support team in Crittenden County that will allow us to create five or six jobs,” Matt said. “Right now we’re just working on Project 1, but we have bigger plans as well.”
He said makePAPER is following a path that worked quite well for another company.
“This is very similar to the way Facebook started,” Hampton said. “We’re starting with a college, and if it does what we think it can do, we’re in a really good position to roll this out to community colleges all over the country and create traction.”
“We’re hoping Mid-South Community College can lead the process. After we launch the technology, this can really be the birthing ground to bring other colleges to learn what we’re doing and how.”
For information about entrepreneurship opportunities at the College, call (870) 733-6722 or email admissions@midsouthcc.edu.
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