Robert Litan: Wichita high school growing young entrepreneurs

It is no secret that Wichita needs another entrepreneurial resurgence if it is to be vibrant in this century. That can’t happen unless either more would-be entrepreneurs move here or we grow our own.

We can’t start growing our own too early. Much research shows, for example, that growing up in a family of entrepreneurs makes it more likely that you’ll be an entrepreneur.

With a declining entrepreneurship rate here in Wichita and nationally, however, that means fewer kids are getting the right kind of environmental exposure to entrepreneurship. If this continues long enough, our city and country could suffer a vicious downward spiral in new business formation.

Fortunately, people can get the entrepreneurial bug in other ways: through their peers and the right kind of entrepreneurial, project-based education. The national and local chapters of DECA and Junior Achievement, and our own Youth Entrepreneurs program here in Kansas, are showing this can be done at the high school level.

One Wichita high school, Northwest, is working with the Entrepreneurship Task Force, led by Gary Oborny and Scott Schwindaman, to prove that experiential, entrepreneurial education can begin even earlier, in elementary school.

Last year, Northwest’s veteran marketing teacher, Jeff Darr, who also supervises the school’s DECA chapter and has coached some of his students to national DECA championships, enlisted the task force and Wendy’s to support a DECA-like competition among third- to fifth-graders in USD 259, whose leaders helped make it all possible. More than 375 students in 15 elementary schools participated, submitting ideas for how to turn a simple water bottle into marketable products. The winning entry: a bird feeder.

This year, three of Darr’s students – seniors Matthew Colburn, Kyle Wegleitner and Dakota West – are again working with the same outside supporters plus Junior Achievement and Youth Entrepreneurs – to expand the competition to all USD 259 middle schools. The younger students will try to innovate with a simple plastic grocery bag, while the older students not only must design a new product with an aluminum pop can, but also create a marketing and business plan along with it.

The competition is all online. The participants must submit two- to three-minute videos on a website the Northwest students created, Innovation U (www.iu316.com), which are due Feb. 13. The Northwest seniors are recruiting local business leaders to judge the entries. The winners and their ideas should be announced later in February on the Innovation U website, and promoted through local businesses.

Darr and his three seniors – who will have moved on to college but who plan to keep up their entrepreneurial activities – have bigger plans for next year: expanding the program to ninth-graders in USD 259. Who knows? After Wichita, Northwest’s program may conquer the entire state, and maybe beyond.

Credit Northwest, Darr and his students, and all those working with them, with showing how great ideas can be launched and then scaled. I wouldn’t be surprised if 15 years from now there are companies you’ll recognize whose founders got their inspiration from the Northwest program.

This story was originally published February 4, 2016 at 6:05 PM with the headline "Robert Litan: Wichita high school growing young entrepreneurs."