Thank You To Our e-Fest Sponsors
Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange (EIX)
Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange (EIX) is a free peer-reviewed resource on entrepreneurship and innovation for entrepreneurs, innovators, and those who support them such as investors, advisors, and educators. Our goal is to improve the success rate of new businesses through education. Philanthropically funded by the Schulze Family Foundation, EIX shares the best research on the practice of entrepreneurship and makes it relevant and accessible to both aspiring and practicing entrepreneurs.
Established in 2014, EIX today attracts close to 5 million visitors a year. It has become the top peer-reviewed applied resource for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, professors, and students. EIX includes research articles by academia’s foremost professors and other experts, experience-grounded insights from established entrepreneurs and innovators, and illuminating interviews in video and audio formats. We also have a vast trove of resources for entrepreneurship students, including articles about e-Fest, our annual competition for business ideas from undergraduates. Articles geared to professors share effective teaching techniques that help enrich the classroom experience and better prepare students for the world of entrepreneurship.
Schulze School of Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Action
At the Schulze School, we teach students to use entrepreneurial skills to solve problems that matter and create value for others. Learn to:
- Identify and evaluate new opportunities
- Transform innovations into sustainable businesses
- Forge connections with fellow student innovators and seasoned entrepreneurs
- Build a solid foundation for long-term success.
Schulze is more than a school—it’s a hub of innovative thinking that engages students, seasoned entrepreneurs, small businesses, change makers and leaders. Innovators from all disciplines come to the Schulze School to explore new opportunities, make connections and turn their ideas into reality.
Founded in 2005, the school has been a leader in entrepreneurship education and outreach. Students learn to turn innovative ideas into sustainable businesses. Hundreds of established businesses have benefited from its expertise, consulting and startup support.
Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation
The Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation (RMSFF) annually awards grants to select organizations operating in the areas of human and social services, education, including college scholarship awards to graduating students from eligible high schools and early learning scholarships for Catholic preschool and health & medicine. The Foundation also partners through multiyear grants with organizations that generate transformational results in these focus areas. On a very selective basis, and by invitation only, the Foundation is also open to grants supporting biomedical research, high performing schools, and mental health organizations with a lengthy and positive funding history that provide prevention, early intervention and children’s/adolescent mental health services.
Schulze has served on the University of St. Thomas Board of Trustees since 1995 and is chairman of the Board of Governors for the university’s Opus College of Business.
“One in 23 entrepreneurial ventures succeeds; the goal of EIX is to improve that ratio.”
Dick Schulze
Richard M. Schulze
In years to come, Richard Schulze hopes that his legacy will be his major contributions to three important areas: business, education and entrepreneurship.
After working as a manufacturer’s representative for electronics components, Schulze founded his own company, Sound of Music, in 1966. The business expanded to six stores in Minnesota by 1983, when Schulze renamed it Best Buy, adopted a warehouse format, and expanded into many more kinds of consumer products. The company soon went public and began a period of remarkable growth after Schulze revolutionized the industry by introducing the superstore to electronics.
Schulze served as chief executive officer from 1983 to 2002, and then as chairman until 2012. He rejoined the company in 2013 as founder and chairman emeritus. Today, Best Buy employs more than 145,000 people and operates more than 1,400 stores in the U.S. and 479 stores in Canada, China and Mexico.
Dick Schulze shares his stories — including how he tripled his income from his boyhood paper route; quit a retail job when his ideas were not valued; started one consumer electronics store, Sound of Music; then transformed that into Best Buy, the largest consumer electronic store chain in the world. Watch the Schulze Interview.
