Less than three years after its formation, the USF St. Petersburg Entrepreneurship Program has been named the Outstanding Emerging Entrepreneurship Program in the United States.
The program, based in USFSP's College of Business, received the award this past weekend at the U.S. Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship's annual conference in San Francisco.
"This provides needed validation for us and the community that we have accomplished a lot here in a short period of time," program director William Jackson, Ph.D, told USF St. Petersburg News. "The success can be attributed to the hard work of everyone involved in the program."
According to USFSP News,
The program includes innovative curriculum that crosses all disciplines and colleges at USFSP, a small-business development center, a business accelerator called Gazelle Lab, the Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship, an advisory board of experienced entrepreneurs and extensive community outreach that brought dozens of Tampa Bay business leaders into classrooms to interact with students. The program also published "Tampa Bay's 6/20 Plan" that called for the creation of an entrepreneurial ecosystem to encourage collaboration among Tampa Bay entrepreneurs and the organizations that support them.
It's the second major honor for the Entrepreneurship Program has picked up in its short history. Last year, the student-run Entrepreneurship Club won the 2012 CEO Startup Simulation Challenge.
The U.S. Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship is the world's largest independent organization dedicated to advancing entrepreneurship.
