Penn State Berks - Creativity and Entrepreneurship Workshop

The Flemming CEED Center will organize its Creativity and Entrepreneurship Workshop for Penn State Educational Partnership Program (PEPP) students on November 12. This middle school program is a day-long field trip to Penn State Berks with the purpose of exposure to creative thinking and entrepreneurship. 

Creativity is a fundamental part of the youth’s entrepreneurial mindset. The PEPP students learn about entrepreneurship, self-assessment, and starting a business plan. The workshops first focus on what it means to be an entrepreneur. PEPP students learn how to become innovative thinkers during the workshops. Throughout the self-assessment portion of the workshop, the students reflect on their passions, and they practice generating new ideas. Then, students collectively worked on a series of creative problem-solving activities and find innovative solutions for the problems in their communities.  Finally, students are taught the basics of a business model and they practice developing their own business model as a team.  

Dr. Sadan Kulturel-Konak, Professor of Management Information Systems and Director of the Flemming CEED Center and Dr. Abdullah Konak, Professor of Information Sciences and Technology are the faculty advisers and workshop co-coordinators. 

Collaborating with PEPP, the Flemming CEED Center has been organizing this workshop every semester since Spring 2013.  “Students show tremendous interest in this workshop, and we are always amazed by how much they can learn and apply within a day,” exclaims Dr. Kulturel, the director of the Flemming CEED Center.  The feedback obtained from the participants shows that the workshop is effective in teaching them how to develop and expand their entrepreneurial mindset through creativity and creative problem-solving activities. 

Sadan Kulturel-Konak