Student Research Project to Benefit Alaskan Entrepreneurs

Students in the UAS School of Management class New Business Ventures (BA-485) undertook a class project during the spring 2007 semester that will benefit entrepreneurs across the state.

The class worked collaboratively to identify all of the relevant business assistance resources in Alaska, including national resources that are relevant to Alaskan businesses. The information on these resources have been organized into a single, easy to use index that can help direct entrepreneurs to appropriate websites and offices to get the help that they need.

Assistance for new business owners and prospective business owners exists in abundance. The difficulty is that these various resources exist in many different places and in many different forms. Even searching through popular search engines such as Google returns so many results that it is hard for entrepreneurs to sort through it all.

BA-485 students used the first half of the spring semester to identify relevant sources of assistance. The second half of the project was to organize and publish the data in a form that owners will find easy to use.

The long term vision for this project is that it will be updated at least annually as a part of a class project. In the future, the information will be published on the web and will also be provided as content to organizations that provide small business assistance.

The small business resource project was just one of four projects taken on by business students at UAS this semester. The other three included a project to help sell more apparel at the UAS bookstore, a project to get Alaskans to pledge to change from incandescent light bulbs to cost efficient and more energy efficient compact florescent (CFL) bulbs and a project to establish a network of graduating UAS business students.

Along with the other three, this project was presented in April at the annual Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) competition in Seattle, Washington by a team of UAS business students - Barbara Miramontes, Elizabeth Stickel, Karen Huntsman, and Toby Harbanuk. The UAS chapter of SIFE was organized and is co-advised by UAS School of Management faculty members Rick Wolk and Steve Hamilton.