(Arnolds Park)– The Okoboji Entrepreneurial Institute, or OEI, will be held next week in the Iowa Great Lakes. Alyssa Petersen of the Iowa Lakes Corridor Development Corporation, which puts on the event, says 32 students from the regent institutions as well as Buena Vista University, Iowa Lakes Community College and Dordt, will be participating this year…
“We do have our welcome reception for the students on Sunday evening at Okoboji Classic Cars, that’s at 6:30. We do dinner, we have the students stand up and introduce themselves, where they’re from, their business just very briefly, and it’s just a great time for networking. And we also have the send off celebration at the end of the week which this year is actually going to be on The Queen, so we’re really excited about that and that is Thursday evening at 6:00 pm and again they’ll introduce themselves, talk about their businesses very briefly and we’ll also actually be awarding. They do a pitch competition on Thursday so we’ll be awarding the winners of that pitch competition as well.”
Also as part of OEI, Petersen says the students will be visiting a variety of businesses in the corridor…
“We really want to make sure that we showcase how important entrepreneurship and our small business owners are in our communities so we can hopefully attract them back to our region as well. We also do a lot of, I think we talked about it last year, it’s been kind of newer over the last couple of years, we have some one-on-one business coaching sessions that they get to do throughout the week, it’s kind of like speed dating where they sit down for about 15 minutes with a entrepreneur or a community leader, business leader, in our region or maybe an OEI alum, and they get to just talk about their business and get feedback and answer some questions maybe if it’s a marketing professional about how do I do customer discovery, what’s the best way to market this? That sort of thing.”
This will mark the 19th year for the Okoboji Entrepreneurial Institute.
