2023 Wolverine Venture Battle
Students had a wonderful time at the end of April serving as Junior Judges at the Grove City College Wolverine Venture Battle. The Center for Entrepreneurship + Innovation (E+I) at Grove City College hosts this yearly pitch event, which consists of several rounds before the final, which we attended on Friday, April 28th.
The Center for E+I serves as a unique experiential component of our students’ education that brings the concepts that they are learning in the classroom to life. Students of all majors participate in exciting competitions, programs, events, and international experiences that allow them to have valuable real-world experience while integrating what truly matters—values, judgment, and a Christian perspective. E+I presents entrepreneurship as a mindset and equips students with a set of practical skills and hands-on experience that prepares them to succeed, regardless of career path.
Programs contribute to local and regional economic development by bringing students and the community together to solve problems cooperatively through service-learning projects, volunteerism, and targeted events. For those students who are interested in starting a business, E+I has programming geared toward supporting student ventures and has a shared mission with the Entrepreneurship Department to educate and inspire principled, high-impact entrepreneurs whose innovations improve people’s lives and solve important problems.
E+I has a physical space on campus, a place where students can come to collaborate, work on assignments, study and learn about and practice design thinking methods.
There is no one right way to start a venture. Therefore, the path to success in the real-world entails competing with teams who use many different approaches to achieve the same goal: funding. The Wolverine Venture Battle (WVB) simulates the real world by allowing teams to compete for prize money without the confines of a cumbersome administratively heavy business plan competition.
This year, E+I welcomed 50 students from 14 different high schools to join them at the battle as Junior Judges, half of which consisted of eAcademy students. Each student had the opportunity to award a $20 prize to the team that they felt deserved their vote. Students also took notes during the pitch competition to refer back to while drafting their own pitches for the eAcademy’s end-of-year pitch competition, Demo Day!
To view the Wolverine Venture Battle Competitor Information from 2023, please visit https://gccentrepreneurship.com/wvb-finals-2023/