With OneDayKC, Campus Innovators Helm a Citywide Entrepreneurial Experiment

In 2015, OneDayKC brought a new approach to spurring innovation among area students by sponsoring a 12-hour, team-based entrepreneurial challenge.

This year, students and staff from three different local universities — Rockhurst University, along with William Jewell College and the University of Missouri-Kansas City — collaborated again to bring their peers the opportunity to take part in OneDayKC Friday at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Nine teams, made up of 52 college and high school students from 20 different schools from the Kansas City area, started the day by learning from leaders that included Bob Bennett, the chief innovation officer for the city of Kansas City, Missouri. Afterward, they split up into to come up with their own business proposal, which would be presented and judged at a public reception at the end of the day in Rockhurst University’s Arrupe Hall.

One of this year’s organizers is Michael Brummett, a sophomore at Rockhurst University majoring in nonprofit leadership and leadership studies, who said he first experienced the event last year as a participant.

“The experience I had with OneDayKC was so transformational and valuable that I wanted to help give other students that same experience,” he said. “Students will be strategically placed into teams that give them the best possible shot to succeed. Business majors are put with engineers, graphic designers, computer scientists, and pre-medicine majors to diversify the teams' perspective and equip them with the needed skillset to create something awesome.”

Participating in the inaugural challenge last year is not the only experience Brummett’s bringing to the table this year as a director. He and the other director from Rockhurst, Michael Frazzetta, officially joined the nationwide pool of University Innovation Fellows in late 2015 after completing Epicenter’s six-week program directed by Stanford University. Over spring break, they traveled with Risa Stein, Rockhurst professor of psychology, to Silicon Valley to meet and discuss ideas with other campus innovation fellows from across the country and learn from some of the nation’s most high-profile innovators, like Google.

Now steeped in that culture of innovation, Frazzetta and Brummett hope to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs with OneDayKC’s collaborative, fast-paced challenge.

“Students who don't take business classes or get business degrees still want to learn about business — they're even willing to sacrifice an entire day with us to learn and compete,” Brummett said. “We recognize this interest, and give those students a taste of what innovation and entrepreneurship actually is. Their participation in OneDayKC is almost a recruiting tool of sorts, because they walk away so passionate about what we helped them create, that they want more. On our campus, we then engage with those participants and get them involved in our efforts, to create an ongoing innovation and entrepreneurship movement.”