CEOs are not born. CEOs are made.
In a world teeming with opportunities, expected and unexpected, be someone with the eyes to see and seize them. The Center for Business and Innovation (CBI) offers IDEATHON 2022 to stimulate the interest of students in entrepreneurship, drive out their best potential, promote creativity, and develop one-of-a-kind ideas.
This spearheaded project opens avenues for mentoring and pools for thoughts that may house small, starting ideas with a change to be the world’s next top business enterprise. Making the University of Batangas Lipa Campus (UBLC) a Business and TechnoHub Campus and extending its reach to the entire University, CBI paves the way toward not only entrepreneurship development but also economic rise and professional growth that shall make the participating students go beyond what their imagination holds.
The fundamental pillar of CBI and IDEATHON 2022 is rooted in holistic and entrepreneurial development in the community. Its ideals progress innovations and creative activities to increase the business community’s progress and unleash the fullest prospects and personal entrepreneurial competencies through knowledge, programs, training, and mentoring. These objectives exist more than to blossom trade, industry, and economy and its stability but more to aid in the realization of students that ideas they may be thinking might be ideas worth sharing.
I DREAMED A DREAM
In the modern business world, students should explore their skills, potential, weaknesses, and strengths before entering the bigger society. With IDEATHON 2022, CBI aims to stimulate a strong, proper mindset in everyone through sharing the latest innovations and technology and inspiring students to be technopreneurs and entrepreneurs. Its mandate to condition the factors and entrepreneurial competencies of students remains unparalleled. “The creation of IDEATHON is for creating ideas – creativity,” according to Mr. Ericson D. Mendoza, Head of CBI.
No matter how fixed everything may seem to be, areas of improvement fill every corner of space. Talking with the language of today’s generation and benchmarking the standards of today’s market can initiate unnoticed opportunities for business around unexpected vicinities and bring about an incubation for success with the three pillars of CBI: Inspire, Innovate and Immerse.
We all start somewhere. The biggest businesses dominating the present, like Google, Apple, SM, and Microsoft, all began at some point – from the ideas, mindsets, and steps their founders took. With creative and innovative ideas in mind, participating students can nurture these even more through IDEATHON 2022.
“Mentoring and coaching are important, especially when it comes to the practice in the real world,” said Mendoza. CBI, through UBLC, prepares the students and gives them the tools and utilities for higher chances of survival in the business world. “In the start-up ecosystem, there is a big percentage. I would say around 97% of start-ups fail because they lack mentorship and tools,” he added. With the exemplary and capable mentors of CBI, students can dream their dreams and forge their path – not to follow the steps of those who came before them but to make their own.
BRIDGING THE GAP
They walked so we could run. The Center for Business and Innovation (CBI) also hosts events where founders and Chief Executive Officers (CEO) discuss the best practices and motivate beginners to pursue their passion and make it a point to do everything they can in everything they do. This stimulates more interest alongside state-of-the-art immersions and innovations in the craft and inspires students to let the world know the ideas they have in mind.
“Success stories are common, but very few founders and CEOs talk about failures,” said Mendoza when asked about the central focus of CBI events. He pointed out that mentors and guest speakers not only talk about their success stories but also share the obstacles that almost hindered them from having such stories. He reiterated the essential significance of failures in simulating what the world offers and providing a platform for students to learn, get inspired, and be more encouraged to overcome fears in the name of their ideas and dreams.
Moreover, IDEATHON gives birth to the spark of entrepreneurship in the hearts of students. By strengthening the mindset of aspiring entrepreneurs, CBI instils the power of higher innovations and uniform start-ups for students to level their ideas up to a point where they reach a level of maturity and financial stability.
“Entrepreneurs like to scale it up,” according to Mendoza. In line with this, the University of Batangas Lipa Campus also worked with the Batangas State University and De La Salle Lipa through the program of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), as they created a community to make start-up ecosystems function more efficiently. Mendoza said that for start-ups to succeed in the ecosystem, they must work together and share the best practices, regardless of affiliations.
In a world where employment is the jewel many students aspire to achieve, CBI works to make society look at the bigger picture. “Recently, we realized in the start-up community that we need to kill that traditional mindset. We can study hard but also aim to create something else – something our own,” Mendoza said. We can study and work hard to get hired and employed by great companies while also striving to make our mark – our legacy.
While the corporate world teaches about leadership and hierarchy, start-ups and entrepreneurship teach one how to start on their own. This inspiration immerses aspiring founders to pave their way to innovation and bridge the gap between their dreams and their actualization.
WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE
Not everyone is a qualified CEO at once, but everyone can be trained to be one. Many may think that ideas and validation are not enough as money makes businesses go around. However, CBI teaches others how to start something up without financial support.
If you only do what you can do, you can never be anything more than who you are now. IDEATHON 2022 exclaims that you cannot and must not be stagnant in the start-up ecosystem. Even with little to no financial support, skills are a good boost in starting something, and once one has started an enterprise, upscaling the business must be next as the industry never stops growing.
Technopreneurs must evolve with time and transcend beyond the usual market and its standards, as the industry is no longer about customer loyalty but now about convenience for customers. So, if you have an idea you believe is worth trying, try to work it out. “Patient experience is the name of the game,” Mendoza said, and the creative and persuasive ways to convince the market and make customer retention more effective play the role of the new branding.
“I believe that there are students with great ideas already. I think they just need a platform or a community where they can share their ideas, as well.” Mendoza believes that IDEATHON is that community that shall serve as the stepping stone for the materialization of ideas – for thoughts to come to reality.
Overall, CBI will be there – to mentor, teach, and be the place where dreams come true. IDEATHON is the conduit that connects ideas to the real world. It is that directive whose trajectory drives out the best in aspiring students and makes them great team players as they build not the best team but the right team.
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime,” as Lao Tzu said. CBI upholds this principle in mentoring its students to be undeniably the best – to never stop in their quest and never settle for less. People have long said universities are not teaching students how to earn money. Now, UB is proving that wrong.
In a world teeming with opportunities, expected and unexpected, be someone with the eyes to see and seize them. And now, CBI’s IDEATHON 2022 is the opportunity that works like an incubator that simulates and prepares students for the real world, where they will be working with different people, skills, and environments.
IDEATHON is not a competition. It is a chance to shoot our shots for our ambition. We are born. And from us, the CEO shall be made.
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