Class Uses Entrepreneurship to Help Katrina Victims

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — As part of a new concept in curriculum development, the Business Foundations class in the Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas, is putting its classroom scholarship into practice to help Katrina victims. Teams within the class have created real businesses in which they purchase the raw materials and create and market the products. They will sell the products at a market place in exchange for donations of canned goods, water and clothing in good shape that will be given to the Katrina relief effort. The project is sponsored by the Walton College Center for Retailing Excellence.

WHEN: Friday, Dec. 2, 2005, sessions at 7:30, 8:30, 9:30 and 11:30 a.m.

WHERE: Donald W. Reynolds Center for Enterprise Development, Buchanan Street (parking in Harmon Parking Garage)

PHOTO AND INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITIES: During the market sessions

This market place experience is a learning simulation designed to engage, inspire, and stimulate student’s thinking through entrepreneurship and business simulations. This program allows students to participate in day-to-day decisions that a business performs such as advertising, promotion, creation of goods and services, capital generation and accounting. For example, pricing analysis takes on new meaning when a classroom business that was once successful in selling its products is now facing bankruptcy because prices were set too low to cover the costs of doing business. Or students observe that companies with lower prices sell more products. They experience the law of demand.