In the News

At this very moment, women across the United States are sitting on million-dollar ideas, like a product that fills a niche or a service that solves a unique challenge. And increasingly, women are turning those ideas into entrepreneurship opportunities. Women accounted for 49% of business startups in 2021, a 28% jump from two years earlier. 

Toward the end of the 2020-21 school year, I developed a plan. Come June, I’d walk out of The Colony High School near Lewisville, Texas, leaving behind a 14-year career in education, then return to corporate America. It wasn’t so much the stress of COVID-19 and remote instruction that did me in, but the monotony. I found myself teaching the same courses, serving on the same committees, feeling the same anxieties — year after year after year. Plus I realized I was becoming more flustered when the least little thing didn’t go as planned in my career education and training classes. I wanted my lessons to be perfect. I wanted to be perfect...

This fall, thousands of students at 196 high schools nationwide -- and even four high schools in Australia -- will start their own companies as part of a business incubator class launched nine years ago in Barrington.

NORTH FOND DU LAC (NBC 26)  — What started out as an INCubatoredu class project is now a massive business success, exceeding all expectations. Commah, a line of air fresheners, car diffusers, and essential oils is now sold online and at several local salons and businesses, and will soon have a spot on the shelves of Festival Foods.

If putting an idea out for expert evaluation is nerve-racking, Grand Island Senior High students Kowsslo Teya and Colton Marsh didn’t show it. Teya and Marsh were challenged to come up with a product idea that would solve a societal problem as part of their INCubatoredu class at GISH’s Academy of Buisness & Communication.

When Amaan Rumi’s business incubator team at Westlake High School came up with the idea to create an app that helps people manage medications and keeps track of things like conflicting drugs and patient allergies, he thought of his grandmother. 

The Lakota West team – MatchedUp - is among five high school groups nationwide invited to travel to Chicago later this month to compete in the “INCubatoredu National Pitch” for thousands of dollars in start-up funding.

Looking for the next big thing? You may find it on the third floor of New Trier High School’s Winnetka campus.

Tucked in a corner classroom, teenaged minds are nurturing and workshopping business ideas in Startup U, an entrepreneurship class in the business education program.

The year-long class, which is led by Sara Burnett and Bob Bollweg, unites student groups and their ideas with mentors, members of the New Trier community who offer real-world experience as the students build and pitch their ideas.

Just as they were born into a world with easily accessible technology (and cannot conceive otherwise), members of Generation Z have only known a climate in crisis. From day one, these young people have had to consider the future of a planet threatened by the actions and inactions of humans. For them, the question isn’t if they will see the effects of climate change, but when, and whether they can take steps today that will lessen the impact of this environmental upheaval tomorrow.

An entrepreneurship program encouraged a group of students to brainstorm and power through a few roadblocks as they created an app for pet lovers...(Printable article here.)