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= Student Entrepreneurship =
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<span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">Students are active inside and outside of the classroom when it comes to advancing their sense of entrepreneurship. Formally, Villanova offers two minor programs, and a certificate program for sophomores in entrepreneurship. A common minor for engineers is '''Engineering Entrepreneuship. '''This minor incorporates technology into a curriculum which gives students the basic tools they need to create and develop a marketable product. Students in this course start with the basics of product ideation and follow a sequence that brings them through the final steps of marketing their product and securing their intellectual property.</span>
<span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">Beyond these for-credit opportunities, there are a number of on extra-curricular displays of student entrepreneurship. Villanova held its second annual '''TEDx''' in the fall of 2013 and it was a great success. A number of short speeches given by students, graduates and faculty members revolving around the theme of “Create, Innovate, Inspire” were astoundingly thought-and-conversation provoking. Between conferences, as is customary with TED events, the inspired audience was able to network and connect.</span>
<span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">The </span>'''Villanova Student Entrepreneurship Competition '''<span style="font-family: georgia, serif;">provides a more hands-on approach to entrepreneurial education. This student-only competition focused on making the world a better place was founded in 2009 by graduate engineering students Ronald Warzoha and Timothy Montalbano, and it operates with the </span>'''Beyond Ideas: The Art of Entrepreneurship''' <span style="font-family: georgia, serif;">group (See Faculty Entrepreneurship). The competition allows students to showcase ideas by pitching them initially on the </span>'''IdeaBounce''' <span style="font-family: georgia, serif;">page. This publicizes their idea and shares it with the Villanova network, helping them hunt down any resources necessary to further their idea (and can be done by anyone at any time even outside of the VSEC competition). For further stages of the competition the students pitch their idea, create a video, executive summaries, posters and financial tables to persuade a panel of judges. The top teams walk away with $10,000 total in prizes.</span>
<span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">Another prevalent competition is the '''Villanova''' '''Innovation Chase.''' For this competition three teams of engineering students go through a preliminary round at Villanova in which they come up with a solution to a problem- last year it was an on-campus transportation problem. The students work through the process of researching, designing, prototyping and presenting their solutions to a panel of judges. The top two teams that survive this qualifier travel to the annual '''Chicago Innovation Chase''' intercollegiate-student entrepreneurship competition.</span>