Marketing students in the Anderson University College of Business were tasked with re-thinking many of the issues we face today and coming up with imaginative solutions for them.
Their projects received funding from The Clouse-Elrod Foundation, Inc. as part of the 2024 Maverick Innovators Fellowship that inspires the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders to catch the “maverick” spirit and nurture their innovative thinking. As Fellows, these students completed an eight-week, cohort-based training program and “Big Idea” research project with their student peers from eight universities across North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, culminating in a presentation of their project.
According to Emma Peters, a double major in Marketing and Accounting with a Dance minor, the eight-week course was an innovation “mindset-reset” kind of course. The foundation provided students with guidance based on top global issues identified by the United Nations—social, economic and environmental.
“We were able to learn where our strengths and weaknesses were when it came to innovation and entrepreneurship,” Peters said. “To finish out that project, we were able to do a paper where we looked at a global issue and we came up with a new innovative solution for it; we were able to present on that with the founders of the foundation as well as professors across the state of South Carolina.”
Peters chose to do a project on global overconsumption and waste disposal practices, focusing on practices and attitudes prevalent among first-world countries.
“I was able to come up with a solution for awareness by using public art displays to bring awareness through public spaces to the issue in hopes that in the future that that could be reduced,” Peters said as she shared her vision for public displays of art works created out of non-biodegradable waste items such as plastic car parts, fast fashion and textiles. “We’d use those to create art pieces that would be lasting, showed impact of what we consume and how it stays on earth for a prolonged period of time—longer than most people would probably expect it to.”
Delaney Smith, who is majoring in Marketing and minoring in Entrepreneurship, focused her project on a sector of the apparel market considered to have a negative global impact.
“My project was based around the idea of fast fashion. Overconsumption of discarded clothing is a huge problem globally,” Smith said. “Trends are just so quick to fade and they change really fast in our society right now because of the way you can find out what people are doing on social media.”
Smith unpacked how fast fashion is harmful.
“Every part of the textile manufacturing process, there’s waste generated at literally every step, and so it’s not even just the clothing itself being discarded and polluting our environment,” Smith said. “The fact that I surrounded my project on is that every second of the day there’s a tractor trailer full of clothing either discarded or burned—every second.”
Smith’s proposal is to involve consignment sellers of clothing and others such as thrift stores to become part of a multi-city event to raise awareness of fast fashion’s problem while at the same time creating a solution that’s more of a win-win.
Marketing Major Eric Moore drew inspiration for his project from working with kids a couple of summers at a sports camp. While there he interacted with a lot of middle school-age youngsters who were involved in travel sports, such as baseball or basketball.
“These are some of the richest kids in America, so it kind of makes sense… They have the money to do it, but I had 10-year-olds one time, and these kids were literally going to Cooperstown, Panama City Beach, Tennessee, Louisiana. They’re traveling everywhere when they’re 10,” Moore said. “When I was 10, I was still playing with Matchbox cars and Hot Wheels. I did baseball practice three nights a week and loved it. I’ll never forget one of the kids basically told me that he likes just being at home on the weekend. I was like ‘good grief, you’re 10. You shouldn’t be worried about your ERA’ or whatever stats they’re worried about.”
Moore is concerned about the burdensome expense not all families can handle and burnout from extensive travel aimed at giving a son or daughter a competitive advantage in a particular sport.
Moore’s project, which he calls the Fun First Movement, is aimed at helping young athletes and their parents value the fun aspects of playing sports. There would be a marketing campaign using high profile sports figures to promote local rec leagues. Another part of the Fun First Movement would be organizing events at community recreation departments. The events would promote team sports while providing fun activities kids can enjoy with their friends. He envisions events where youngsters can enjoy playing their favorite sport, but also enjoy rides, food and parades with their teammates.
The Maverick program keenly develops an innovative mindset among students—highly desirable in interviews for a variety of professions as well as for entering graduate school.
“You’re able to build a skill set to become better at those things, which is very valuable to companies and firms when you’re going to look for full time or even part-time employment,” Peters said.
“I loved being able to find a problem, find a solution and see what overall impacts I think my solution would have,” Moore said. “This was definitely a very helpful part of my education.”
For Smith, a big takeaway was the program’s focus on creative problem-solving.
“Innovation is something that can be taught if you just take time to learn it. I haven’t really started my entrepreneurship classes, but that’s kind of a different side of things,” Smith said. “It was really cool to learn how to be an innovator.”
