Taking the Classroom
to the Marketplace

CMC alumni know the value of real-world experience. To help students transfer lessons from the classroom into the real world, three recent graduates, including Adam Altman '99 and Sunil Rajaraman '01, donated a total of $10,000 to establish an Entrepreneurship Award Fund at the Kravis Leadership Institute.
The Entrepreneurship Award is an annual prize to be awarded to an individual CMC student or team of students whose business plan for an entrepreneurial venture has the greatest potential of becoming a viable business.
The award will be presented to students in Professor Jay Conger's seminar, "Leading Entrepreneurial Ventures." During this course, students learn about the issues facing entrepreneurs from raising funds to building a management team to setting up a board of directors to addressing legal issues to marketing with limited resources to finding a profitable business model.
"What an amazing opportunity for our students," said Conger, the Henry R. Kravis Research Chair in Leadership Studies and professor of psychology. "KLI appreciates the generosity and vision of Adam, Sunil, and our third donor. I am very excited about the potential of this award to encourage entrepreneurship among our students. It gives them the seed capital to take an idea, develop a business model, and then implement that plan into an actual business."
As part of the course requirements, students must produce business plans for actual venture ideas. These plans will be presented to Professor Conger and the award-fund donors for consideration of their viability. The award will be presented to the best team or individual business idea as seed capital to launch the business.