Founded and run by The Idea Village for 14 years, New Orleans Entrepreneur Week returns for the first time March 24-29 as a co-production with Loyola’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development, under the direction of veteran tech entrepreneur Bobby Savoie. What does this change mean for the event? Savoie explains.
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“If this model succeeds, there’s no reason this can’t be done statewide. I really would like to see it become a Louisiana event, more than just a New Orleans thing.”[/caption]
Just like the startups it celebrates and supports, New Orleans Entrepreneur Week (NOEW) is a venture that is constantly looking to grow, and growth comes through change and sometimes reinventing yourself.
The “weeklong celebration of innovation, entrepreneurship and culture in the Gulf South” that we now know as NOEW debuted in 2011 — a time when New Orleans was experiencing a post-Hurricane Katrina boom in entrepreneurship reaching 40% above the national average. Over the years, NOEW has transitioned from a business event to a community event, with educational and networking experiences throughout the city. Last year’s NOEW included 101 sessions, 268 speakers and 27 different venues. The event drew 5,400 virtual and in-person attendees, a 31% increase over 2023.
One thing has not changed, however. While NOEW has long been aided by multiple sponsors and partnerships — including last year’s announced partnership with the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University — it has always been under the sole direction of The Idea Village.
But now, for the first time, The Idea Village is sharing the load with someone else — the Loyola College of Business, specifically Loyola’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development, both of which are led by Robert “Bobby” Savoie.
It would be hard to find a person better suited to help lead the event through its next phase of development.
First, Savoie is a successful entrepreneur. Loyola lured him out of retirement after a 42-year career in business (36 of those years spent as CEO of companies he founded or co-founded). He has launched several successful global business ventures, including the information technology and engineering services firm Geocent that was headquartered in Metairie until it was acquired in 2021. He also worked as an engineer and consultant, primarily in nuclear power and defense. Among his clients were the departments of Defense and Homeland Security and NASA, which honored Savoie with its Distinguished Public Service medal, the highest award bestowed on a non-NASA employee.
He is also passionate about education. Savoie earned a PhD. in engineering and applied sciences from University of New Orleans, an MBA from Loyola University New Orleans and a Bachelor of Science in industrial engineering from Louisiana State University. He has served on various boards at each of these institutions, and all three have honored him for his contributions and achievements. UNO’s College of Engineering is even named for Savoie.
Finally, Savoie has a strong community focus. As well as serving on the board of The Idea Village, Savoie is currently a board member of the UNO Foundation, the LSU National Board, the LSU Health Foundation and the Aerospace Alliance. His past board service has included organizations like the Boy Scouts of America, The National World War II Museum, the U.S. Small Business Technology Foundation and GNO, Inc.
In a recent interview with Biz New Orleans, Savoie explained how Loyola’s prominent role in NOEW this year, and moving forward, is part of an effort to take NOEW to a whole new level.
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Students will learn a lot, will see people who are successful in entrepreneurship, will see businesses that are successful. And the businesses get their names in front of these students who may be ready to graduate and do something with them.[/caption]
The Idea Village has partnered with a lot of groups, but never to the level of co-producing. How and why has this happened?
For one, I’m very familiar with Idea Village. I was involved when it first started. I’ve always loved NOEW. Having our Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development partner with The Idea Village, where we’re able not only able to host it but to co-produce it, and do it at the same time as Tulane book fest and Tulane’s Innovation Week, is a great opportunity. We’re a block apart, so the students can go back and forth, the professionals can go back and forth. You’re talking about 2,000 students between Loyola and Tulane who will be exposed to NOEW. And you’re talking about 3,000 to 5,000 professionals — everything from entrepreneurs to businesspeople to the businesses that sponsor it, the venture capitalists — they’re all getting exposed to the students.
Students will learn a lot, will see people who are successful in entrepreneurship, will see businesses that are successful. And the businesses get their names in front of these students who may be ready to graduate and do something with them. I truly believe that it’s going to make for a great mix.
What changes will people see in NOEW with this new setup, this year and potentially in the future?
The main change will be involving the students, and the partnership of four universities. We’re going to co-produce, but Tulane, UNO and Xavier are all partnering with us to do this. They will host “NOEW in Your Neighborhood” events, and they will be here, involved with the main event. In the future, the plan hopefully would be to expand that more regionally. I would love to involve Southeastern and Nicholls and reach into those communities.
Then if this model succeeds, there’s no reason this can’t be done statewide. I really would like to see it become a Louisiana event, more than just a New Orleans thing. I think expanding regionally is our first step, and hopefully, if we can do that, we’ll have the support of Louisiana Economic Development and the administration to do more elsewhere in the state.
Somewhere down the road, is Loyola interested in taking over the full production of NOEW?
Yes, if things go well this time, and if that is something that The Idea Village would like us to do, then we absolutely would embrace it. We would want to do it in partnership with the other universities as well.
You retired from your business career in October 2023 and began serving as interim dean of Loyola’s College of Business on January 1, 2024, a position that then became permanent in October 2024. What was it about this opportunity at Loyola that drew you back into the working world?
My first answer was an emphatic “No!” My wife and I were in Greece celebrating my 42 years of work and now retirement, but over the next couple of months, through a lot of thought and prayer, it seemed like it was the right thing to do, to give back to the students, to the city. My wife and I are strongly committed to education. It’s the great equalizer. I felt like it was put in my path for a reason.
Even after your success in business, you decided after you sold your second company to return to school to get your PhD. Why was that?
It was a promise I made to myself 28 years ago. I finished my first semester of my PhD, but my wife and I were getting married in a few months and I was broke, so I decided I would go work for a while, then go back to school. I did not expect it to be 28 years later. I had a three-year non-compete agreement with the company that had bought my second company, so I figured why not? And I thoroughly enjoyed it. I sat in class for two years, then spent a year and a half doing my dissertation.
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A formal education, to me, is the way that we lift the bottom one-third of our city, of our state. I’ve always told my children that we are only as good as the bottom one-third of our city, and if we don’t help lift them up, we will never be what we could be.[/caption]
You have served on the boards of all three of your alma maters. Obviously, you have a passion for higher education. What role has formal education played in your success?
It opened doors to give me an opportunity to prove what I could do. My first job was working at the Waterford 3 nuclear plant, which was like throwing a fish into water, I loved it. I was able to design systems to help us to not only build but license the plant. Between my engineering degree and my MBA, I understood both the business aspects and the engineering aspects of it. A formal education opens the door for you to prove what you can do and then advance rapidly if you are able to do it. It brings opportunities that not having a degree might limit you from.
In general, how important would you say a formal education is to success in business?
I think it’s extremely important. There are people who succeed in business without a college degree or much formal education, but it’s harder. I’ve watched a lot of people who worked for me be limited in their careers, simply because different jobs required a degree. We did a lot of contracting work with the federal government, and people who I knew could do the job, I couldn’t put them in those positions because they required a degree. Again, education is a great equalizer. A formal education, to me, is the way that we lift the bottom one-third of our city of our state. I’ve always told my children that we are only as good as the bottom one-third of our city, and if we don’t help lift them up, we will never be what we could be.
What are some things that you learned from experience that you wish had been included in your formal education?
Something I learned from my grandfather. He said, “Never expect anyone to work harder than you’re willing to work.” Despite having multiple degrees, I worked 60 hours a week. Sixty hours was a short week for me when I was building my companies.
Formal education doesn’t tell you that you’re going to have times when you have to make a choice between paying your house note or paying your employees. And, of course, the answer is you pay your employees. So, I wasn’t as prepared for the downturns in business as much as I was prepared for the upturns. But that’s when you just buckle down and work harder.
I can’t say enough about work ethic. I grew up on a sugarcane farm where everyone worked hard. When I was 14, I used to dig the mud out from under the bottom of the scales where we weighed the cane trucks. I’ve always said that I would hire someone with a “C” average from the University of New Orleans with a great work ethic, worked their way through school, before I would hire someone from an Ivy League school with a 4.0 average but had never had a job. I don’t think we stress enough how important it is to have a great work ethic, to be able to communicate, to look someone in the eye when you are talking to them. We can teach somebody all the technical skills and software and business skills that we want to, but those softer skills are equally important.
Looking back at your first year as dean, what have been the biggest surprises and/or lessons?
No real surprises — I have been involved with Loyola for a long time. But the challenge is all the impediments in higher education that make things go so slowly. One of the things I told the provost and the president is that I will take this job as long as you let me get around the impediments and support me in doing that.
We’ve made great progress. We need to embrace AI before it rolls over us, and we’re doing that. We’ve repurposed two of our chairs in pretty much record time, and they’re focused on what the College of Business needs to be.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking to CEOs that I know, and they’ve all told me the same thing: We need to graduate critical thinkers that are problem-solvers, that know how to use AI and other technologies, to not only help their companies but to help their customers. That’s what’s going to make a difference at Loyola. I did face, and still face, the challenge of trying to do that more quickly than it’s normally done in academia. If this was a company, I could do it in a year. It will take me three here.
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We have come a long way as an ecosystem here from when I started my first company in 1986. No one knew what to do with a technology company. I couldn’t get funding for anything.[/caption]
That would be one obvious difference between running a business and running a university department. What are some other differences and/or similarities?
There are a lot of internal politics. You have it in private industry, but in private industry, I could just push it aside. You can’t do that quite as easily in academia. You really need to attract people to an idea, get their support, where in a company I could just say, ‘All right, this is the direction we’re going to go in.’ Here I need to get the support of a whole lot more people. And keeping it is equally hard. I can’t do anything without my faculty agreeing to it. I’ve got to work with them and get them to understand it, and listen to them and their ideas, because they’re brilliant people.
What are your goals for the business program here?
To take what is a good college of business and make it a great college of business. One, by bringing in some new technology. I mentioned AI, and business analytics is critically important, that is our fastest-growing major, it is the problem-solving major. I’ve repurposed two of our chairs, one in entrepreneurship and the other in business analytics, because that’s where the future is.
Things that make us more than a vanilla college of business at a small, expensive liberal arts university, which is not a recipe for success. We have to have unique programs that are very attractive to people.
The co-producing of NOEW is with Loyola’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development at Loyola. Can you explain what that center does?
It encourages entrepreneurship with our students. We have a program called “Side Hustle Expo” where students in their dorms can start a business. Rather than getting a job somewhere, they make money by running a business out of their dorm room or apartment.
We also have something called “Wolf Pack LaunchU,” which allows anyone in the Loyola family to form businesses and go through the process of refining them. We then have a judging night where we distribute $30,000 in investment capital to these businesses.
We have several other programs like that, one of which is a joint program with Idea Village called “IdeaCorps.” Many of these feed into Idea Village, which is why this move is a natural fit with our Center of Entrepreneurship and Community Development.
I taught a graduate-level course last semester in entrepreneurship, and my class put together an incredible business plan for putting electric vehicle charging stations in between metro areas. If you’re going to take EVs on vacation, you’re worried about charging. So, we had to come up with unique experiences that people could have while they are there for 20-30 minutes.
Our entrepreneurship program teaches real-world entrepreneurship to people who may want to do that at some point in their careers. Most people don’t start off as entrepreneurs. I didn’t; I had to get experiences and learn a lot before I started to become one. I’m very proud of that center.
What are your thoughts overall on the entrepreneurial ecosystem here?
We have come a long way as an ecosystem here from when I started my first company in 1986. No one knew what to do with a technology company. I couldn’t get funding for anything. I paid my employees when I got paid because I didn’t have any money to pay them otherwise.
Now, I think our banking system has embraced entrepreneurship much more. Our accountants know a lot more about startup companies. Law firms are much more attuned to entrepreneurship. What I try to do is look at places like Silicon Valley, or Research Triangle, or Bangalore, India, 40 years ago and study how they got critical skill sets going.
We have pieces of that in place now, it’s just on a small scale.
We still have challenges in trying to build companies here, because we’re not sophisticated enough to help scale small entrepreneurial companies into larger companies. However, our talent level here, particularly in anything related to software and technology, has gone up enormously in the last 20 years.
But all the elements that make an ecosystem — what I call “self-refueling,” where more money and jobs are coming in than are leaving — we’re not quite there yet. We’re an adolescent entrepreneurial economy, we’re not yet mature. But we can still get there. We limit ourselves. Some of the things that are inherently Louisiana are also limiting to entrepreneurship. But I think we have come a long way in the last 20 years, and I think we are still improving on a year-to-year basis. We’re headed in the right direction.
