Ole Cup Entrepreneurship: A Liberal Arts Guide to the St. Olaf Pitch Competition¶
An interactive intelligent textbook guiding St. Olaf students through ideation, Ikigai discovery, team formation, and the Ole Cup entrepreneurship pitch competition.
Getting Started¶
This intelligent textbook will guide you from your very first spark of an idea all the way through pitching a business at the Ole Cup — St. Olaf College's annual Shark Tank-style entrepreneurship competition hosted by the Piper Center for Vocation and Career.
Whether you are a music major, an art major, a biology major, or studying anything else, entrepreneurship is for you. Over the last decade, Ole Cup participants have come from every corner of campus — and that diversity of perspective is exactly what makes strong ventures.
Use the navigation sidebar on the left to explore chapters, the learning graph, MicroSims, and supporting reference content.
Front Matter¶
- About — audience, prerequisites, and how to read the book
- Course Description — the seed document used to generate the learning graph
Chapters¶
The main body of the book lives under Chapters. Each chapter takes you one step further along the Ole Cup journey — from discovering your Ikigai to building a team, crafting a pitch deck, and standing on stage.
Learning Graph¶
The Learning Graph shows how concepts depend on each other. Concepts are introduced in dependency order so prerequisites are always covered before they are used.
MicroSims¶
Interactive simulations live under MicroSims. Each MicroSim focuses on one concept — for example, drawing your own Ikigai Venn diagram or stress-testing a value proposition — and is embeddable as an iframe inside chapter content.
About the Ole Cup¶
The Ole Cup is St. Olaf College's annual student entrepreneurial pitch competition, launched in 2014 and hosted by the Piper Center for Vocation and Career. It is open to all enrolled students regardless of major, and has awarded more than $250,000 to student ventures. Past winners include JonnyPops (now on shelves at Target and Costco), and social ventures reaching communities from sub-Saharan Africa to the Caribbean.
The Ole Cup winner automatically qualifies for the Minnesota Cup student division semi-finals — the largest statewide new venture competition in the country, with a $30,000 student prize and a $50,000 grand prize.