ASU College of Business students win at 2012 Governor's Cup
A business plan team from Arkansas State University participating in the 2012 Donald W. Reynolds Governor’s Cup business plan competition received the best Agriculture Award in the graduate division recently in Little Rock.
The Governor’s Cup is the premier business plan competition where 53 teams from Arkansas colleges and universities competed for a total of $272,000 in prizes.
Recent College of Business graduates, Brandon Boone, Cody Brown and Doug Strickland, developed the business plan for Cam-Ah-Co, a manufacturer and distributor of a mobile unit that farmers can use to extract oils from crops such as Camelina and soy beans.
The team developed the business plan in the fall 2011 Small Business Management course under the supervision of Dr. Erick Chang with full support from Drs. Kevin Humphrey and Steve Green from the College of Agriculture and Brian Rogers from the Arkansas Biosciences Institute (ABI).
The students received a plaque and $5,000 from the award sponsor Farm Bureau. The students were also finalists in the overall business plan competition winning a total of $6,000 in prizes. This is the first time that ASU has won a top prize in this competition.
Dr. Len Frey, dean of the ASU College of Business, said, “We are extremely proud of the Cam-Ah-Co team and all the students who participated in the Governor’s Cup. The partnership between the College of Business, College of Agriculture and the ABI is something that we want to replicate across the university in the future. It is our goal to make the entrepreneurial spirit systemic across the campus as it is entrepreneurial endeavors such as these that will help to move Arkansas forward in the future.”
Cam-Ah-Co was one of the six ASU business plans submitted for the competition. A second ASU team (Kathy Winston, John Whisnant, Morgan Sharp, Chandler Young, and Jesse Woods) developed a plan called Natural Solutions, a Camelina feed supplement company, which was a finalist in the Agriculture undergraduate division.
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