Willes Entrepreneurship Center’s 2015 Empower Your Dreams business competition was held last week and is a continuation of the 2014 Fall Great Ideas Competition, which introduced student business ideas through video. This year’s Empower Your Dreams Competition focused on the entrepreneurship strategy known as “crowdfunding.”
Crowdfunding is a funding venture that raises small monetary contributions from large numbers of people, usually via the internet. Students and alumni who participated in this year’s Empower Your Dreams competition created crowdfunding campaigns and posted their business ideas or projects on popular donation websites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Crowdrise.
Participants entered one of the three categories: published, unpublished, and alumni. The published category requires participants to come up with a business idea, make an advertising video, publish the campaign on crowd-funding platforms to raise money, while the unpublished category only requires a great idea and a video. The alumni category has the same requirements as the published category, but one of the team members must be an alumni. This year’s three winners of the categories were Apollo Pieces, a company that produces paracord bracelets designed by CJ Dadivas and Soram Yun; Odinwear Virtual Reality Goggles, a company that creates affordable virtual reality headsets; and MyBoo, a company which sells bamboo bags and purses handcrafted by Welster Tropia.
In conjunction with the competition, a fireside devotional, themed “Flooding the Earth with Truth,” was held on campus in the Cannon Activities Center. Guest speakers included Jon Schmidt of the Piano Guys, singer/songwriter Peter Hollens, and the Harmon Brothers, who were responsible for organizing a record-breaking nativity scene in 2014. They spoke about how to spread goodness in the world through their work on social media. Advice they offered included never giving up, relying on the Lord, doing what the Lord desires, and magnifying blessings from God.
To view Youtube videos of Peter Hollens and Jon Schmidt's musical performances during the "Flood the Earth with Truth" devotional, click the following links:
Peter Hollens: "I Won't Give Up"
Jon Schmidt: "Summer Jam"
To find out more about the Willes Entrepreneurship Center, visit https://willescenter.byuh.edu.
