MGIS grad student places third at White House entrepreneurship competition

July 26, 2011

Chaz Tanner, a Management Information Systems graduate student, placed third at the White House Urban Entrepreneur Forum Entrepreneurship Competition on July 20, 2011 at Xavier University. The White House Business Council, the Office of Public Engagement, the Domestic Policy Council, and Xavier University hosted the competition as a part of the White House Urban Entrepreneur Forum.

Tanner placed third for his company TC Solar Powered Flatboat Oil Skimmers, LLC. To compete in the competition, students had to develop a business plan, a sixty second YouTube presentation, and a sixty second "elevator speech".

SUNO's College of Business & Public Administration had two teams in the Entrepreneurship Competition--Tanner and Nyisha Walton for Walton Enterprise Trucking, LLC. Dr. Louis C. Mancuso, Professor of Marketing, acted as moderator for the three teams.

Business incubator for SUNO approved

June 27, 2011

The Louisiana Board of Regents during its June meeting in Baton Rouge approved the University's request to build a $3 million on-campus business incubator facility. More than $2 million of the funding for the building has been pre-approved by the U.S. Department of Education and comes from a special Title III -College Cost Reduction and Access Act Program.  The incubator will be located on the Lake Campus, close to the new College of Business & Public Administration building which is near completion and should be occupied during in the fall.

Rendering by VergesRome Architects

The incubator, which should be completed within two years, will allow for a seamless interaction between classroom education and real-world entrepreneurs. In addition to the space to be rented out to the entrepreneurs, the building will contain faculty and staff offices as well as meeting rooms to be used by tenants and students.

The University expects the business incubator to pay major dividends, academically for SUNO. It will create an ideal environment for cross-disciplinary learning and entrepreneurial collaboration between business majors and students from such majors as Social Work, Education, Substance Abuse Counseling, Criminal Justice, and the Natural Sciences who wish to go into business in such areas as mental health, child protection, assisted living, group homes, daycare centers, adult literacy, inmate-to-society transition programs, chemical dependency education, and drug abuse counseling. The facility will also support the College of Business & Public Administration's AACSB accreditation plan by allowing the faculty to deliver more practical teaching, research excellence, community ser-vice, and meet other AACSB and SACS accreditation requirements.

The approval of the incubator will also benefit the New Orleans area as America's new breeding ground for entrepreneurship. The August 2009 issue of Entrepreneur magazine declared the New Orleans Metro area as one of the cities with the fastest growth in entrepreneurial activities. Based on the number of individuals and organizations that have participated in SUNO's business workshops, over 1,000 potential small businesses in the New Orleans metropolitan area could benefit from and/or use the services of the proposed on-campus small business incubator.

Business professors receive Distinguished Research Award

December 2, 2010

Drs. Louis Mancuso, Ghasem Alijani, Obyung Kwun, and Elizabeth Barika won the Distinguished Research Award for their paper "Enhancing Drugs Access in Normal and Critical Circumstances". The team received the award at the Allied Academies Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada in October.

Two teams were also placed in proceedings at the conference. Drs. Mancuso, Alijani, and Kwun were placed for "The Effects of the BP Oil Spill and Hurricane Katrina on Businesses in South Louisiana". Drs. Alijani, Mancuso, Kwun, and Barika were placed for the award-winning paper mentioned above.

The team also managed to get their research slated for publications in 2011. "The Effects of the BP Oil Spill" will be published in the Entrepreneurial Executive Journal and "Enhancing Drugs Access" will be published in the Academy of Health Care Mangement Journal.

Drs. Mancuso and Alijani appeared on WVUE-TV's "Fox 8 Morning News" in August to discuss the results of their oil spill research.

College of Business and Public Administration building groundbreaking comes with fanfare

March 24, 2010

Southern University at New Orleans held the groundbreaking for its College of Business and Public Administration’s building on March 24th on the Lake Campus. 

"We are humbled by the good fortune that has come upon us, yet we know that none of this is by accident," said Dr. Igwe Udeh, Dean of SUNO's College of Business and Public Administration.  "Our team works hard to provide SUNO students with the information, resources and learning they will need in order to take charge of their future in a fast-changing world.  These recent achievements, combined with the groundbreaking, are clears signal that Southern University at New Orleans is serious about empowering our students."

The event followed two significant academic victories for the college.  Drs. Obyung Kwun, Louis Mancuso, Ghasem S. Alijani won the Outstanding Researcher for the Allied Academies.  The group was joined by Dr. David Nickels, from the University of North Alabama, with their paper “Fairness and Small Business Owner's Attitude toward Grant and Grant Agency”.  The article will be published in Academy of Entrepreneurship Journal.

Earlier in the month, a student team from SUNO won the Morehouse Business Plan Competition.  Moderated by Dr. Mancuso, SUNO Business Entrepreneurship students Tonia Simmons-Doakes and Erica Bilbo won the top prize of $10,000 for their concept, Housing Innovations, LLC.  The SUNO team beat out teams from Howard University, the University of Virginia, Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College.