Ice House Entrepreneurship Program Training Future Business Leaders

It’s an awfully big undertaking to go in to alone. In fact, most entrepreneurs open the doors of their business with product or service knowledge but what they lack is the knowledge to run a business. They might be master plumbers but don’t know how to market the business. They may be computer geniuses but lack the knowledge of how to price their service competitively but still make a profit.

To go back even further, the world has an even bigger problem. Education systems encourge learning certain subjects and ideas but it falls short of teaching students how to think like an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur doesn’t think any problem is too difficult to solve and an entrepreneur doesn’t do things the same way as the people around them but that isn’t a way of thinking that is being encouraged.

The Ice House Entrepreneurship program wants to change that. Simply put, this is a course design to teach entrepreneurial thinking and it has the backing of some pretty big organizations. It’s main sponsor is the Kauffman Foundation. As one of the largest foundations in the world, it’s main goal is to encourage small business growth and get more people on the path to starting their own business.

The program is based on two parts. First, the book by Clifton Taulbert, Who Owns the Ice House?. This book teaches 8 important life lessons that Taulbert, recognized by TIME magazine as one of the worlds most successful entrepreneurs, learned from his Uncle Cleve, an outside the box entrepreneur who lived in the segregated south. Second, the course. Based on the book, this 100% online course offers chalkboard presentations, video interviews, and case studies as well as an online discussion board where budding entrepreneurs can gain guidance from fellow classmates as well as established business owners on how to think and dream like an entrepreneur.

This program has already caught the eye of some of the largest collegiate entrepreneurship programs in the nation as well as the Cisco Entrepreneur Institute, an elite corporate level program designed to teach people how to think like entrepreneurs.

“The Kauffman Foundation is proud to sponsor this powerful new education program,” said Thom Ruhe, director of entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation. “Drawing on the experiences of real-world entrepreneurs provides a powerful model that can encourage and empower people from all walks of life.”

The Kauffman Foundation has long been not only a passive supporter of entrepreneurial efforts but also a research organization and a foundation providing funding for outstanding programs which help to train the next batch of business leaders. The world needs outside the box thinkers and the Ice House Entrepreneurship program as well as the Kauffman Foundation are helping to train and support those future leaders as they start down the path of business ownership.