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We were pleased last week to learn that Delta Plastics of Little Rock will be the new sponsor of the Arkansas Governor’s Cup Collegiate Business Plan Competition.
The annual competition had previously been sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, which is concluding operations — the nonprofit had always planned to shut down at some point — at the end of this year.
As title sponsor, Delta Plastics will provide $154,000 in cash prizes for the first-, second- and third-place overall winners in the graduate and undergraduate divisions in 2018.
Although the competition, as Arkansas Business explained in a cover story earlier this year, has generated only a few actual businesses from the winning teams, its real legacy “lies in the connections forged and the lessons learned about business and entrepreneurship.”
“I would say that starting actual businesses from the competition could be a byproduct of the success, but it’s not a driver of the success; it’s not a measure of the success,” Rush Deacon, CEO of Arkansas Capital Corp., which organizes the competition, told us. Deacon said the goal of the competition was to improve entrepreneurship education in the state, and it clearly has done that.
Dhu Thompson, the owner and chairman of Delta Plastics, said the company began to support the Governor’s Cup after he served as a judge in the competition and was impressed by the students and the professors who guided them.
“Each year, it impresses me,” Thompson said. “I just think the opportunity it presents for the students is phenomenal. The entrepreneurial side is something I promote because of what I’ve lived through with business.”
So thanks to Thompson and his Delta Plastics, this phenomenal opportunity will continue to be available to student entrepreneurs in Arkansas. That’s the very definition of “giving back to the community” we hear about so often.