Chicago Inno (Dec. 4) -- Chicago, get ready for Shark Tank, campus-style. On Monday evening, Chicago entrepreneurship nonprofit Future Founders is hosting the U.Pitch Elevator Pitch Competition and Showcase, a national pitch competition for top student startup founders. Competitors include Illinois students like David Kirby, for his startup ChairDrop, and Thomas Reese, for his app FlipWord.
Related stories: Chicago Tribune (Dec. 9) -- The Future Founders second annual U.Pitch College Elevator Pitch Competition was held in Chicago Monday. One finalist was Thomas Reese, an Illinois student and founder of FlipWord, a passive foreign language learning tool that replaces a few words on websites with those of a foreign language of the user’s choosing.
Chicago Inno (Dec. 14) -- Recently launched student startups (either current students or graduated in 2015) to watch in 2016 are Anansi, MakerGirls and Kofman Technologies.
CNBC (Dec. 22) -- For four-year colleges and universities in the U.S., about 77 percent of public and private not-for-profit institutions offer entrepreneurship courses. That's according to research from Illinois on behalf of the Kauffman Foundation, which tracks entrepreneurship.