HOLLAND - The winners of the 2010 Hope Entrepreneurship Initiative Idea Pitch competition were families.
° Lindsay Allward, a senior management major from Milford, presented "Rent-A-Parent" for parents who can't be in two places at once.
° Lisa King, a senior management and Japanese studies double major from Oxford, created a way to make shopping more efficient by labeling clothes according to body type.
° Ericka Morales, a sophomore studio art major from Holland, designed a product concept to help parents bring fun and creativity into their children's lives while the children are drifting into sleep.
A total of 16 students competed for an Apple IPAD and other prizes earlier this month through the Hope Entrepreneurship Initiative (HEI), a program sponsored by Hope's Center for Faithful Leadership. Paul Jones of Steelcase, Jonathan Koop of Add-a-Lingua, Jennifer Linart of Lakeshore Advantage, and Stephanie Milanowski of the Hope art faculty served as judges. Allward and Morales are eligible to advance to a regional competition sponsored by area colleges and universities in November.
Allward desires to "create a trust-worthy organization comprised of retirees who would be the 'rented parents'." King seeks to "label women's clothing by which body type it fits best (i.e. pear shape, apple shape, hourglass shape, and rectangle shape) and distributing the clothes by the type in the clothing stores for easy accessibility." Morales is not only pursuing patent protection for a children's product, but also copyright protection for a logo and packaging.
The Center for Faithful Leadership (CFL), through its HEI program, plans to sponsor a business plan competition for Hope College students this coming March.
"Leaders have ideas. Hope College's outstanding Christian liberal arts education enhances students' potential to be creative servant leaders," said Dr. Steve VanderVeen, who is director of the CFL and a professor of management at Hope. "HEI provides one venue to incubate this creativity."