It's the Cisco Entrepreneur

Too often it seems, bill companies and institutes will start an educational or service program in the United States, develop it domestically, and then export it to the other countries. Cisco Systems has done it the other way around, creating a training ground for entrepreneurs in 39 foreign countries.

Today, at the Future of Entrepreneurship Education Summit in Orlando, a Cisco official announced that this program was finally making it to the United States. "We're ready to come back home and say 'this is what we've learned,'" Veronica Tostado-Span, Latin America regional manager for the Cisco Entrepreneur Institute.

The institute is designed to provide technical training, strategic workshops, and mentor relationships for both startups and existing small businesses. It also has an "iExec" track to help business owners and top executives for businesses of all sizes. Tostado-Span said institute locations will be in various schools, companies or organizations throughout the United States and will begin training entrepreneurs in the next few months.

It won't be a free service, but Tostado-Span was unable to detail the costs. She did say Cisco is working on a pricing plan intended to recover its costs for licensing material, rather than using the institute as a profit center.

More details can be found here.

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