Ross Students to hit the road for an entrepreneurial road trip you’ll wish you could go on, too
May 3, 2016
This May, eight Ross MBA students will embark on a road trip across America to meet with social entrepreneurs around the country and work with them on bringing innovative solutions to the challenges their companies are facing.
It’s part of Open Road, a new action-based social entrepreneurship program developed by Ross students and based on the MBAs Across America Open Road model. The aim of the program is to give small business owners extra help in solving complex challenges, and to help students gain firsthand experience understanding the various issues social ventures face.
Over the course of the next five weeks, the students will drive from state to state meeting entrepreneurs, spending one week on site in each location working together on a solution to a business problem, and then pack up the car and hit the road again.
From Michigan to Texas, and from North Dakota to Alabama, the two teams will meet with nine companies in seven states:
TEAM IBAM
- Sweet Potato Sensations, Detroit, MI
- Discovery Recycling, Daleville, AL
- Goods That Matter, New Orleans, LA
- AMP360, Austin, TX
- Connecting for Good, Kansas City, KS
TEAM SASA
- Mitten Crate, Detroit, MI
- Garden Fresh Farms, Maplewood, MN
- Emerging Prairie, Fargo, ND
- Flipgrid, Minneapolis, MN
Teams will be chronicling and reflecting on their journeys in various ways over the next few weeks — here’s how you can follow along:
Student Voices Blog
Students will be writing about their travels and work in each location on a weekly basis in the Ross Student Voices Blog — you can subscribe to the blog to get alerts about new posts.
Teams will be posting pictures from their road trips to Instagram using the tag #RossOpenRoad. Once their trips begin this week, you can follow the tag to check out pictures from the road. Students traveling are listed below, along with their Instagram accounts.
TEAM IBAM
- Aaron Steiner, MBA ʼ17 (+LAB Fellow)
- Iris Nguyen, MBA ʼ17
- Blake Van Fleteren, MBA ʼ17
- Mikaela Rodkin, MBA ʼ17 (+LAB Fellow)
TEAM SASA
For more about the trip, information on the companies, and bios of the team members hitting the road this summer, visit the Center for Social Impact site.
The Open Road program is sponsored by the Zell Lurie Institute, the Center for Social Impact, the Sanger Leadership Center, and General Motors.
Reprinted from Michigan Ross