Instead of heading to Florida for fun in the sun during spring break, eight DePaul University MBA students and one faculty member will spend the week of March 21 to 28 volunteering as consultants for small enterprises with social service missions in post-Katrina New Orleans while participating in a challenge with other top b-schools.

Teams representing DePaul’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business, Stanford University School of Business and the University of California, Berkeley’s Hass School of Business, as well as a group from salesforce.com, will head to the Crescent City to participate in the inaugural "IDEAcorps Entrepreneurship Challenge." The challenge is sponsored by Idea Village, a Big Easy-based nonprofit that aims to "sow the seeds of change through innovation and entrepreneurship."

The initiative will pair each team with a New Orleans small business or start-up venture dedicated to the revitalization of post-Katrina New Orleans. The students will apply their MBA know-how to solve critical business challenges facing the ventures to which they are assigned. The goal is to help New Orleans entrepreneurs become self-sustaining while giving "students a world-class experience through hands-on, experiential learning with real-world implications," according to Idea Village’s invitation.

Assistant Professor of Management Patrick J. Murphy, the DePaul students’ faculty advisor, said the team’s work could include "conducting feasibility studies on the potential for growth, investigating product or service opportunities, assessing management team strengths and needs, or market and competitor research." Murphy and his students have engaged in team-building exercises to prepare for the challenge so they can hit the ground running when they get to New Orleans. They won’t know what venture they will be working with until shortly before the challenge begins.

MBA student Lucas Weingarten of Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, who organized DePaul’s team and was part of two previous business school volunteer trips to New Orleans, said the students stepped up to help plan the friendly challenge because of a "genuine interest among my colleagues to not only apply our skills to real business issues and gain practical experience, but also to help ventures that give back to the New Orleans community.

"We want to represent DePaul’s service mission and the business school in the most effective and engaging way we can," he said.

Murphy said the group’s sentiments reflect a growing social entrepreneurship movement. "When historians look back on this period in business, the biggest paradigm shift they will see is the realization among business people that making profits and creating social value are no longer mutually exclusive. Our MBA students at DePaul see this. Because they come from such incredibly diverse backgrounds, they are aware of very specific challenges facing various constituencies, and they want to get involved in ventures that offer solutions to these challenges."

Weingarten will be joined in New Orleans by fellow students Tina Cajigas, Claire Spinti, Malado Cisse, Kevin Spinti, Justin Henderson, Poonam Thakkar and Steve Sobotka.

At the end of the week, each team's work will be evaluated by a panel of business and civic leaders for its potential to solve the challenges it addresses.  No winner will be chosen, but the teams will gain from the rewarding real-life experience of helping entrepreneurs.

The IDEAcorps Challenge  sponsors include: Greater New Orleans, Inc., Harrah’s, Jones Walker, Hornbeck Offshore, New Orleans Hornets and Tulane Freeman School of Business. Supporters include Blue Moon Fund, Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and Tulane University.

Google will provide a blog for students to chronicle their work, The blog will be posted on ideavillage.org.

Editors' Note: For more information about Idea Village and the challenge, contact Abhi Bhansali: (504) 897-0462.