Budding entrepreneurs will have a chance in November to pitch an idea and launch a startup company in 54 hours during Bend Startup Weekend.

The event will be among about 125 startup weekends taking place worldwide in November, and the local winner will participate in a Global Startup Battle, said Alec Campbell, the primary organizer of Bend Startup Weekend. Bend’s Startup Weekend will also contribute to the region’s other efforts to support entrepreneurial talent.

“How does a town like Bend become a Boulder (Colo.) or an Austin (Texas)?” Campbell said. “You can try to attract that talent here, or you try to cultivate it from the existing community.”

More than 670 Startup Weekend events have been held worldwide, creating more than 5,000 startups, according to the organization’s website. The program is now an affiliate of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo., nonprofit dedicated to entrepreneurship.

But the concept has Central Oregon ties.

Sister’s native Andrew Hyde developed Startup Weekend in 2007, Campbell said, and sold it to the foundation. “You can’t teach entrepreneurship,” Campbell said. “You’re either a risk taker or you’re not. But, you can feed the mentality of entrepreneurship to help people recognize the opportunity, form an idea that is a solution to the problem that they’ve recognized, and then have the help around to take that initial kernel of an idea and develop a business from it.”

Bend’s Startup Weekend begins Nov. 16 and will take place at the offices of online-marketing company G5. Portland has one scheduled for the same weekend, according to the Startup Weekend website, and Eugene will host one starting Oct. 12.

At the Bend event, up to 100 people can participate and share their ideas for businesses. Those ideas will be voted on, and about 20 will be selected, Campell said.

Each idea will get a team of four people, and team members will spend the weekend developing the idea. On Sunday, teams will present their business concepts and get feedback from a panel of judges made up of business leaders and investors. The judges will pick a local winner, who will be entered into the Global Startup Battle.

“The purpose of the course of the weekend is to gain market validation for your idea and have a sort of working demo,” Campbell said.

Jim Boeddeker, one of the event organizers and part of the Tech Alliance of Central Oregon, said the event will help create a venue for entrepreneurs that have ideas in their heads, but don’t know how to get started.

An entrepreneurial ecosystem exists in Central Oregon, he said, through Central Oregon Community College and Oregon State University-Cascades Campus, the business incubator FoundersPad, and Economic Development for Central Oregon and its events, PubTalk and the Bend Venture Conference.

The startup weekend is another element in building an effective ecosystem that helps new businesses get established.

“It kind of creates a stepping-stone that will help us establish many more companies and increase the quality of those companies,” he said. “(It will) also increase the possibility of success for a brand-new startup.”

On the Web

For more information Bend Startup Weekend, visit http://bend.startupweekend.org/

On the Web

For more information Bend Startup Weekend, visit http://bend.startupweekend.org/