Advancement and Development through Entrepreneurship Programs and Training (ADEPT) Conducts Entrepreneurship Seminar for Faculty and Students in Myanmar

Advancement and Development through Entrepreneurship Programs and Training (ADEPT) Conducts Entrepreneurship Seminar for Faculty and Students in Myanmar

The five-day seminar provides an in-depth look at how to practically apply entrepreneurial ideas and innovation-based concepts into academia and businesses.

June 7, 2016

IU Kelley faculty Christopher Cook, Marty Pieratt, and Fred Schlegel, and IIB Executive Director LaVonn Schlegel traveled to Myanmar from May 31–June 6, 2016, to host the ADEPT Entrepreneurship Seminar.

With close to 140 faculty and students–mostly women from Yangon Institute of Economics–in attendance, two separate interactive sessions were held.

IU Kelley Senior Lecturer Fred Schlegel at ADEPT Entrepreneurship Seminar

First titled “Adding Entrepreneurship and Innovation to Your Syllabus,” the faculty sessions concentrated on how instructors could help their students start a business by incorporating entrepreneurship and innovation-based concepts into their syllabi. Visiting IU faculty and staff discussed the importance of entrepreneurship for student’s future success, as well as identified different classroom teaching methods and pedagogy frameworks and mechanisms to properly be adapted into any subject to increase student’s entrepreneurial knowledge and innovative capability.

IU Kelley Visiting Lecturer Marty Pieratt at ADEPT Entrepreneurship Seminar

Student sessions titled “Being Innovative by Being an Entrepreneur” were specifically tailored to inform that entrepreneurship is an attitude, a process, and a goal; that an entrepreneur takes ideas and moves them through to reality in a scalable way; and, the entrepreneurial mindset leads to both new businesses and improvements to existing organizations. In this workshop, students learned various ways to enhance and build entrepreneurial skills through problem identification, business model innovation, strategic problem solving, team building, effective communication, and feasible idea-generation techniques.

Another IU Kelley faculty Terry Campbell will be traveling to Myanmar in late July to teach problem-solving, critical thinking, and business leadership skills in integrated business challenges.

ADEPT is a public-private partnership funded by USAID with the IIB, in collaboration with major alliance partners Hewlett Packard (HP), the VinaCapital Foundation’s Lotus Impact fund, and Business for Social Responsibility (BSR).

This visit vastly contributes to ADEPT’s core mission–to bring a lasting legacy of entrepreneurship skills, opportunities, and capacity building to the business and higher-education of Myanmar.