National Entrepreneurship Week Recap

Businesses and community members celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit last week, packing the Grey Eagle for Ignite Asheville and gaining applicable information at the Chamber's Biz-Talks. Read on for highlights of these events.

Biz-Talk: Harnessing the Power of Your Competition

Businesses and community members celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit last week, packing the Grey Eagle for Ignite Asheville and gaining applicable information at the Chamber's Biz-Talks. Read on for highlights of these events.

Biz-Talk: Harnessing the Power of Your Competition

"Competition is something we usually run from versus something we run to," said Meredith Elliot Powell of MotionFirst at the Biz-Talk on Monday Feb. 20th. Powell highlighted a simple process to come to understand one's own business and better understand the competition so that companies can identify competitive advantage and find opportunities. "Competition is the home of innovation," Powell said. Her process included conducting a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) as well as connecting to competitors to see how you can learn from and help one another. But perhaps her most enlightening and perhaps unintuitive point was to ignore it; do the homework on your competition but ultimately put your energy into your own business.

Ignite Asheville sparks community enthusiam

A sold-out crowd packed the Grey Eagle Tuesday, Feb. 21st for Ignite Asheville. Ten speakers went on-stage armed with 20 slides to enlighten the crowd on a topic of their choice in just five minutes. Topics ranged from learning about the law to how to challenge your assumptions to what Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 teaches about life, love and business. Following the lightning talks, audience members voted for their favorite speaker. Blake Boles squeaked out a win by just one vote with his talk on how to use money that might have been spent on college to creatively gain an alternative and effective life education.

Biz-Talk: Apps for Business

Jose Ibarra of Applied Solutions Group, Inc. highlighted how mobile apps can be beneficial to business in a hands-on talk on Friday, Feb. 25th. Jose provided attendees with an opportunity to interact and engage with him on a variety of mobile applications in the marketplace. He provided troubleshooting on the spot for a couple of attendees who had encountered a couple of issues.  "The apps for business class was great!" said Pam Lewis, Director of Entrepreneurship at the Chamber. "I think everyone left with a new app they wanted to try and a better understanding overall of mobile applications for business."