The Superior Express -

Nuckolls and Thayer County Extension hosted their first annual Inventure Day at the Nuckolls County fairgrounds on Friday, Nov. 17.  Inventure Day is a single-day entrepreneurial adventure for middle school youth developed by the Nebraska Extension Entrepreneurship Focus Team. Using innovation and creative problem-solving, teams of youth develop unique business concepts around a given widget which is used as inspiration for a product or service. Teams move through the Inventure Factory, completing challenges and working together to develop their business idea. Throughout the Inventure Day experiences, youth learn about a variety of entrepreneurial topics, including product development, target markets, branding, and finance. Youth learn what it takes to start a business through first-hand experience while working with adult mentors and entrepreneurs from their own community. At the end of the day, teams present their business ideas to local business mentors in a product pitch competition.

Fifty-one students across the two counties from Deshler, Lawrence-Nelson, Superior and Thayer Central participated in the day.  Thanks to sponsorship from local banks including Midwest Bank, Bruning Bank, Cornerstone, Home Federal, Horizon Bank, and Thayer County Bank students were able to participate in the day free of charge.  Entrepreneurs from the two counties as well as representatives from some of the banks served as mentors for each team of youth helping to facilitate their imagination and inventing their new idea.

New creations ranged from a ditch cleaner to an automatic feeder, to a Wave player or a cleaning attachment for a Roomba. The winning invention was the Wave player with a close second being the Leaf Monster. 

The purpose of Inventure Day is to encourage youth to return to their rural communities and become entrepreneurs themselves in hopes of helping our rural communities thrive. As Mrs. Amber Epley, Lawrence-Nelson guidance counselor said, "Exposing students to the entrepreneurial world is a great way to get them thinking about how they may be able to solve a problem and create their own business. In our area, students have to be willing to be entrepreneurs if they want to return to the area as there are not a lot of job opportunities in our towns."