The Art of the Hustle
By Naperville Magazine
May 2026 View more Biz
By Jeff Banowetz
Teaching entrepreneurship through Business Incubator
When she signed up for Naperville North’s business incubator class, junior Shona Bouri knew that she would have to come up with a new product around which she and her team could create a business. She was talking about it with her grandmother, who lives with the family, when she noticed all of her knitting materials sitting nearby. “She would always sit in the sunroom and knit new sweaters or gloves,” Bouri says. “But she just kind of stopped. So I asked her, ‘Why don’t you knit anymore?’ ”
It turns out that arthritis-related neck pain made it difficult for her grandmother to look down at her work. “So I thought, what if she could?” Bouri recalls.
It was the beginning of an idea she and her team have been working on this school year—a product (named InVision Lense) that attaches to a pair of glasses, allowing wearers to see down without tilting their heads. The product is one of a wide variety of concepts students have dreamed up as part of the business incubator program, which has boomed in popularity at Naperville North and Naperville Central, as well as other high schools in the area.
“These are the types of skills that can’t be found in a textbook,” says Gene Nolan, one of the Naperville North teachers who leads the program. “You have to immerse yourself in the process of building something to understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur.”
And students are rising to the challenges. “They’re asked to solve problems, build new and better ways of doing things, work as a team, collaborate on presentations—these are all skills that they will continue to use long after this class that they gain from this experience,” Nolan says.
Naperville North started a business incubator class in the 2018–19 school year with 24 students. The program has grown to 168 students, with 37 teams working to create businesses, including product prototypes, business and marketing plans, and social media campaigns. Students from Naperville North and Naperville Central will come together for a District 203 Pitch Night, when the top 16 teams across both schools will present their ideas before a group of judges. The event, held this year on May 7 at Embassy Suites in Naperville, is open to the public, and the top team will win $3,000 to help build its business further. It’s just one of several Illinois (and national) competitions available to students interested in creating businesses.
“It’s really taken off,” Nolan says. “Kids really put in an amazing amount of effort. They are reaching out to experts and vendors like you wouldn’t believe. They’re calling China to get what they need…It’s impressive to see what these young people are capable of doing.”
Bouri and her team, which includes juniors Sanjana Gurram and Sarina Yusuf and sophomore Akash Bhatt, found that they could attach a prism to a pair of glasses to project the line of sight downward. But obtaining prisms was much harder than they expected.
“We had the idea for these new and bigger prisms, but they were thousands of dollars,” Gurram says. “So we had to figure out what we actually could do to get a product out. And we talk about how with more funding, we could improve a product in these different ways.”
Each team is supported by members of the local business community, who serve as mentors and coaches. “I think my role is really just to ask questions. ‘Have you thought of this?’ ‘What made you decide to take this route?’ ” says Mike Connell, a sales director at SC Johnson, Naperville resident, and Naperville North graduate. “I’m not involved in rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands dirty. It’s their project, their idea, and they get all the credit. But if I can help them network or provide them some advice, that’s really my role. Honestly, it’s been an incredibly rewarding experience for me. It makes you feel like the future is in good hands.”
Photos: Jeff Banowetz; InVision (prototype)
