WSU's College of Engineering helps sponsor entrepreneurship camp
Camp Destination Innovation is organized and led by Marquetta Atkins, a recognized leader of Wichita entrepreneurship movement. In 2017, she received the Urban Professionals Dream Chaser's Civic Engagement Award for her work in promoting entrepreneurship to youth and women.
Atkins, a WSU communications alumna, started the camp in 2015 while working for the Urban League of Kansas. Each year, three dozen high school students spend three weeks being introduced to people, places and experiences designed to ignite their imaginations. "We want them to become comfortable being spaces they may have never been," Atkins said.
In 2017, she began operating the camp independently, with financial support from Bank of America. Atkins said it is a challenge each year to find classroom accommodations for the camp, which runs three weeks in June.
The WSU College of Engineering volunteered to provide classroom space and laptops, as well as instruction by Gary Brooking, an engineering faculty member who teaches, mentors and judges a number of WSU entrepreneurship competitions and classes. The camp met for three weeks in June -- one week in the Experiential Engineering Building and two weeks in Wallace Hall.
Destination Innovation campers are introduced to the concepts of entrepreneurship -- identifying a need for a new product and learning how to produce, market and sell that product. Campers present their product concepts at a culminating trade show.
This year's campers attended 1 Million Cups Wichita, a weekly event designed to connect budding entrepreneurs over coffee; visited the Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Kansas Leadership Center and Koch Industries and Youth Entrepreneurs of Kansas. They designed and printed T-shirts at MakeICT they later sold at a Market Day at the Juneteenth ICT community gathering.
Guest speakers included Jarod Nola, a former WSU Innovation Fellow, Todd Ramsey, owner and founder of Apples & Arrows. Campers also spent one day shadowing individual entrepreneurs. In between field trips and speakers, campers developed product and business concepts they presented at the tradeshow on Friday, June 29, hosted by e2e, a business accelerator that sponsors the camp.
Besides the College of Engineering, e2e and Bank of America, other camp sponsors include Wichita Community Foundation, The SEED House and Zernco Inc.
Atkins said the camp empowers youth, most of whom would be first-generation college students, to see bigger possibilities for themselves. One of the camp's alumni, Kevin Dao, a 2018 graduate of Wichita's Southeast High, won a Harry Gore Memorial Scholarship, WSU's most prestigious scholarship, worth $64,000.
WSU College of Engineering saw sponsorship of the entrepreneurship camp as a natural extension of its emphasis on experiential learning and creativity to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset, said Polly Basore Wenzl, coordinator of WSU's engineering summer camps. "We look forward to a continued partnership and the opportunity to bring more engineering into their curriculum next year."
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Contact: Polly Basore, strategic communications officer, WSU College of Engineering, 316-978-6512 or polly.basore@wichita.edu.