Opportunity | Students a great source for fresh, innovative ideas

Karen Murdoch says she thinks the business community is in need of some fresh ideas and innovative thinking, and university students could be the ones to supply it.

Murdoch, the director of the University of New Brunswick's International Business and Entrepreneurship Centre, is also the organizer of the school's first annual week of entrepreneurship, which has seen established entrepreneurs visiting business administration classes since Monday.

As part of the weeklong celebration, the school hosted a meet and greet luncheon Thursday afternoon which gave students the opportunity to network with members of the business community. Among the attendees were Keith Ashfield, the federal minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, and Greg Byrne, the provincial minister of Business New Brunswick. Murdoch said the event was all about the students and their ideas.

"We wanted to really bring our students to the forefront and encourage them to go out and take charge of their own future," she said. "You can't go out there and think you are going to change the entire world, but you can change the world around you and today we wanted the students to come and speak to the ministers and talk to them about how they intend to change the region once they are through with university."

Thursday's luncheon was well attended by not only business students, but also those from engineering and other faculties.

Murdoch, whose centre offers several services to student entrepreneurs, said it's important that students start networking and planning their businesses before leaving UNB.

"Now is the most important time for these students," she said. "Businesses that students open before they graduate have such a higher survival rate than ones that open after they graduate, so we want to give them a leg up now."

Kumaram Dhillainabarajah, a fourth year engineering student at UNB, attended Thursday's luncheon and said the event gave him a good chance to network. Dhillainabarajah is a finalist in the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation's Breakthru business plan competition and is currently tossing around the idea of commercializing a pressure sensitive material he created, which he thinks could be used for a number of things including prosthetics and video game consoles.

"It was a great chance to meet people with some real business experience," he said. "You can't depend on other people to create jobs for you, you have to create your own jobs and that is kind of the idea here."

Ashfield said he left feeling encouraged after speaking with enthusiastic student entrepreneurs like Dhillainabarajah.

"My role as minister of Atlantic Canada is to grow Atlantic Canada and make sure we prosper in the future and this is all part of it," he said. "The young people are our future and it is nice to see so many people really excited and wanting to get involved in new projects and setting up companies. This is the part of my job I love."

Ashfield added that in some strange way the current state of the economy is good news for the aspiring entrepreneurs present Thursday.

"There is always good and bad and I think we are going to see a lot of exciting things to come out of this downturn in the economy including new projects and new ideas," he said. "We are positioning Canada to come out of this recession before any other country in the G7 and with the money we are putting into infrastructure and science and technology and research and development we are positioning ourselves to come out as a front runner."