Season 3, Episode 9 - Identifying the entrepreneurial spark

On The Heels of Innovation with Ted Zoller

With Sheri Smith, founder and CEO of the Indigo Project

What if you had more than an inkling of who is most poised to become an entrepreneur? What if there was a way to identify K-12 students who may lack access to traditional resources, but who have characteristics they can use to build entrepreneurial success? In this episode, Sheri Smith describes how her venture, the Indigo Project, uses an assessment technology based on artificial intelligence to find young entrepreneurial-oriented students and inspire them to build their own ventures. What does it mean that entrepreneurs score high on individualism, innovation and futuristic thinking, but low on time management? Is their tendency to focus on external goals a help or a hinderance? And can entrepreneurial behavior really be predicted? Smith answers these questions and more. She also shares a case study of how the assessment technology helped identify students from the Navajo Nation Indian reservation who are now using their entrepreneurial spark to make an economic impact.