Seton Hill University has received a grant from the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation to support Seton Hill student entries into e-Fest® 2019 and the Schulze Entrepreneurship Challenge for the third consecutive year. 

The $1,500 grant will provide support for Seton Hill student teams to develop business plans to submit to the national challenge, held as part of e-Fest® 2019, an undergraduate entrepreneurship competition. 

“Seton Hill is excited once again to provide our students with the opportunity to develop real business plans for products and services as part of the e-Fest® 2019 Business Plan Competition, “ said Lyzona Marshall, Seton Hill assistant professor of Business. “We are always looking for real-world opportunities to bring into the classroom, and we are thankful to EIX.org and the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation for offering a platform where our students can learn more about entrepreneurship through doing. Entrepreneurs solve problems by offering solutions through multiple disciplines. This opportunity really exposes students to entrepreneurial ways they can impact the world through a focus on what problems in the world can we solve.”

The grant provides support for teams to develop a concept so they can have a more refined presentation as they enter their works into the national competition. 

Marshall has been working with students in her Seminar for Entrepreneurs course as well as the Wukich CEO Entrepreneurship Club and other students from multiple disciplines who have expressed interest in developing their own business, product or service. 

Seton Hill is able to submit five team projects to the national competition. A list of 25 national finalists will be released in mid-March. The finalists will travel to Minneapolis in April for the competition and a chance to win prizes totaling $250,000. 

A Seton Hill student team was among the 25 national finalists in the competition in 2017. The team of H. Fitzgerald Robertson II, Austin Sheridan, Melanie Ansell, Dhiraj Totwani developed Sensor4Safe, a device and app designed to reduce the harm to babies and pets accidentally left in vehicles. It monitors movement and temperature in the vehicle and sends messages to the owner's smartphone. 

The Schulze Entrepreneurship Challenge is sponsored by the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas, the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation, founded by Dick Schulze who created Best Buy Co., and EIX.org, an online platform for entrepreneurs, students and professors, with fully vetted interviews, articles and content from those who have succeeded in building a business or developing a product or service for the global marketplace.