My Entrepreneurship story

So, I've had a great experience learning about entrepreneurship, as well as innovation, this past year. I'm enrolled in this program called "Innovation Academy" at UF, in which we spend our first two semesters on classes, such as Creativity in Context and Creativity in Action. During the first semester we learned how to think creatively, while in the second semester we put our "fresh knowledge" into action. This means that we would have to think "out of the box" and come with a solution to a problem that is of big importance to people. This "idea or product" would have to be presented in an actual showcase, called the Catalyst Showcase at UF. My team and I had an idea relating to the food industry & mass consumption in the US. An enormous amount of fast food chains have taken over the US and a lot of ready-made or processed food are being promoted as the best solution when people don't have time and money to cook. As a result, we came up with the idea of making an app ("FoodBudds") that would help people buy their own groceries and make their own food in limited time and cost. It is an app that consists of a recipe database, one that anyone can personalize in terms of their own needs (availability, budget, health issues, food preferences, etc.), thus making the recipes customer oriented. The challenge in this project was to figure out the main problem, in which people chose convenience over health, and then to present a solution that sounded applicable to today's reality. From my experience, I have learned that in order to find a solution one needs to find out the facts of a certain phenomenon, by asking about all the possible "whys" and then finding all the possible solutions. As we already mentioned in class, ALWAYS think about the costumer's need when making a business plan, instead of making something innovative, yet useless, in the long run.
ENT 303 is a great course for people that want to lead their own company and put their ideas into action. I enrolled into this class because it is mandatory for the Innovation Academy course schedule. Despite that, I find this course very useful and mind-opening, because we are being taught to think in ways that we haven't though about before. I hope I learn ways to confidently promote my own ideas online and mostly in person.

PS. My team and I won the "Make It Happen" award, which was presented in recognition of the prototype or idea with the greatest potential for implementation.