2022 Top Free Entrepreneurship Exercises
“Your posts help me keep my students engaged – they and I thank you!” – ExEC Professor
Based on the popularity of our 2019 Top 5 Lesson Plans and 2020 Top 5 Lesson Plans articles, here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
We designed the following exercises and lesson plans to transform your students’ experience as they learn how to stay motivated, prototype, and work with finances.
5. Teaching Business Model Canvas with Dr. Alex Osterwalder
Most entrepreneurship programs use the Business Model Canvas (BMC) in some way (it is a core element of the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum).
In collaboration with the BMC creator himself, Dr. Alex Osterwalder, we produced a series of lesson plans detailing how he teaches his powerful tool.
With this 3-part series, you can . . .
- Part 1: Introduce the Business Model Canvas
- Part 2: Teach students how to write business model hypotheses
- Part 3: Demonstrate how to prioritize their riskiest assumptions
4. Financial Modeling Showdown
Financial modeling is incredibly difficult to teach in an engaging way.
That’s why, in addition to our more advanced Financial Projection Simulator, we developed a new game that makes introducing financial modeling fun and interactive.
If your students get overwhelmed by financial modeling, this game will help them learn the core concepts in an accessible way.
3. 60 Minute MVP
Imagine your students, in just one hour, building, and launching, an MVP . . . with no technical expertise! In our 60 Minute MVP exercise, we present an exercise during which students build a landing page MVP that:
- Tells their customers the problem their team is solving,
- Uses a video to demonstrate how the team will solve the problem and
- Asks for some form of “currency” from their customers to validate demand.
If you’re looking for an immersive exercise that activates your class, complete with a chaotic, noisy, high-pressure environment, that teaches real entrepreneurial principles, give “60 Minute MVP” a shot.
View the 60 Minute MVP Exercise
2. Design Thinking with the Ideal Wallet
The Ideal Wallet is an awesome exercise for teaching students to use empathy, prototyping, and iteration to design creative solutions to problems. This exercise that comes from Stanford University’s d.school is a fast-paced way to introduce your students to design thinking.
During this intense exercise, students will learn:
- That what is important for them to discover is what is important to their customer
- To design solutions specifically related to their customers’ emotional needs
- To prototype their design with simple household materials and
- To gather customer feedback on prototypes
As a result, students will know how to develop powerful solutions for customers because they can empathize with the person or people for whom they are designing solutions.
Available in both an In-Person Version and an Online Version.
1. Motivate Students with Pilot Your Purpose
Students engage when entrepreneurship feels relevant.
This exercise makes entrepreneurship relevant by helping students discover that entrepreneurial skills will help them pursue their passions – regardless of whether they become entrepreneurs.
This is our favorite exercise because when we help students discover their passions, it becomes clear to them that entrepreneurial skills will help them turn a passion into their life’s purpose.
Suddenly, entrepreneurship becomes relevant and engagement increases
In fact, our students like this exercise so much, we’re making it the first lesson plan in the next iteration of our full Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum.
Want 15 Weeks of Lesson Plans?
If you are looking for a fully structured, experiential entrepreneurship curriculum, with a semester’s worth of lesson plans that students love, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
We’ve done the work for you.
- Check out the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum
- Check out an entrepreneurship syllabus for Creativity & Innovation, New Venture Creation, Social Entrepreneurship, Intro to Entrepreneurship, & MBA Entrepreneurship & Innovation courses
What’s Next?
In upcoming posts, we will share lesson plans for new exercises we shared at our Winter Summit!
Subscribe here to be the first to access these new exercises.
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