Financial Projection Simulator [ExEC Online: Express Pack]

March 31, 2020 Justin Wilcox Comments 0 Comment

To help with the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve fast-tracked the development of new online-ready exercises – which you can use individually or as a set – called the ExEC Online: Express pack, available free through June.

Our second lesson, Financial Projection Simulator (FPS), is ready for you to use!

Making Finance Fun

Even in the best of times, students struggle to engage with and understand the financial elements of entrepreneurship. Of course, this topic is critically important, especially during times of economic uncertainty like we’re facing now.

To help make entrepreneurial finance more accessible to all students, we designed our Financial Projection Simulator to teach financial modeling, with a fun, game-like experience.

Encourage Experimentation

The Financial Projection Simulator leads students through an experimentation process where they make different assumptions about their financial model, including their:

Product price
Cost of Customer Acquisition
Employee salaries (including benefits & taxes)
Initial capital investments
Etc.

And as they enter their assumptions, the simulator automatically calculates the financial sustainability of their business, giving students a Red, Yellow or Green assessment:

This question-based approach forces students to think through the major elements of a financial model in an approachable way. Plus, the real-time feedback encourages students to get creative, iterating their business model until they find one that’s profitable.

Engage Your Students

Like all of our lessons, the Financial Projection Simulator uses several resources to create an experiential, interactive experience for students online, including:

Step-by-step videos for students
Overview videos for you, like this:

When combined, these tools create an engaging experience for your students (even when they’re learning about finance ;).

Get the Financial Projection Simulator

Get All Four Free Lessons

The ExEC Online: Express Pack is a collection of free, interactive, online entrepreneurship lessons available through the rest of this term that you can easily plug into your class individually or as a set.

In addition to Financial Projection Simulator, we’re releasing three other exercises that are not only engaging, but particularly relevant in this time of uncertainty:

Problem-Inspired Idea Generation: We know customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems – and right now people’s problems have changed dramatically. This exercise will show your students a systematic way to identify new opportunities inspired by their customer’s real-world problems that is particularly helpful during times of disruption like we’re experiencing right now.
How to Interview Customers: Now that business model assumptions have been flipped on their head, it’s more critical than ever that students learn how to effectively talk to customers to discover what problems they’re facing. A person with the skills to learn about how this new world will effect people individually, is a person that will thrive during this, and any future dramatic changes. This lesson will help students understand how to find customers to talk to, what questions to ask, and most importantly, why asking them will form the basis of a successful business model.
60 Minute MVP: The key to thriving in the face of high uncertainty and limited resources is efficient experimentation. This exercise will show your students how to quickly launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to measure demand for their products/services. Plus, even outside the entrepreneurial context, in a future where online, remote-enabled work will likely be in demand, this is a great opportunity for students to learn how to build websites and create animated videos.

We’ll be making each lesson plan available as soon as it’s finished, so if you’re interested in using any of the exercises from the ExEC Online: Express Pack, please fill out the form below.

Due to the accelerated pace we’re releasing these lessons, the first iteration of the ExEC Online: Express Pack is designed for use in colleges/universities in the US and Canada. Future iterations will be accessible to students across a wider range of environments.

Regardless of who or where you teach, we welcome you to request access and we’ll notify you if, and as soon as, we’re able to bring your students on board!

Get All the ExEC Online: Express Pack Lesson Plans (Free)

Know an Entrepreneurship Instructor?

If you know anyone who these new lessons might help, please invite them to participate! You can:

Email them this URL: https://bit.ly/ExpressPack
Click here to share on LinkedIn
Click here to share on Facebook

Thank you for all the work you’re doing teaching, and supporting, young people during this challenging time – we’re grateful to have an opportunity to support you, and look forward to helping you however we can!

Problem-Inspired Idea Generation [ExEC Online: Express Pack]

March 26, 2020 Justin Wilcox Comments 0 Comment

Our first lesson, Problem-Inspired Idea Generation, is ready for you to use!

Idea Generation is a Skill

Customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems – and during this crisis, people’s problems have changed dramatically. This exercise will show your students a repeatable way to generate business ideas, inspired by their customer’s problems, that will become the foundation for opportunity identification skills they can use throughout their careers.

3 Steps to Better Ideas

Problem-Inspired Idea Generation creates an experience where students:

Learn why great business ideas come from problems.
Brainstorm people they’re passionate about solving problems for.
Hypothesize, and prioritize, those peoples’ problems.

Those hypothesized problems kickstart your students’ customer discovery and/or solution ideation processes, resulting in more meaningful, and more feasible business ideas.

Engage Your Students

Our goal is to create highly interactive, experiential exercises. You can review this lesson to see how it can help you engage your students online with tools like:

Interactive Digital Worksheets your students can fill out and turn into you online
Video overviews for students
Sample slides for you to use with any live, or recorded, videos overviews you’d like to (optionally) produce for you students
Assessment recommendations

Get the ExEC Online: Express Pack

Get All Four Free Lessons

In addition to Problem-Inspired Idea Generation, we’re releasing three other exercises that are not only engaging, but particularly relevant in this time of uncertainty:

How to Interview Customers: Now that business model assumptions have been flipped on their head, it’s more critical than ever that students learn how to effectively talk to customers to discover what problems they’re facing. A person with the skills to learn about how this new world will effect people individually, is a person that will thrive during this, and any future dramatic changes. This lesson will help students understand how to find customers to talk to, what questions to ask, and most importantly, why asking them will form the basis of a successful business model.
Financial Projection Simulator: With a global recession looming, it’s essential our students understand the elements of a robust financial model, and how to develop a sustainable one. This exercise makes finance approachable by turning what would normally be an overwhelming series of numbers, into a game-like experience that enables students to experiment with many different financial models.
60 Minute MVP: The key to thriving in the face of high uncertainty and limited resources is efficient experimentation. This exercise will show your students how to quickly launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to measure demand for their products/services. Plus, even outside the entrepreneurial context, in a future where online, remote-enabled work will likely be in demand, this is a great opportunity for students to learn how to build websites and create animated videos.

We’ll be making each lesson plan available as soon as it’s finished, so if you’re interested in using any of the exercises from the ExEC Online: Express Pack, please fill out the form below.

Due to the accelerated pace we’re releasing these lessons, the first iteration will be designed for use in colleges/universities in the US and Canada. Future iterations will be accessible to students across a wider range of environments.

Regardless of who or where you teach, we welcome you to request access and we’ll notify you if, and as soon as, we’re able to bring your students on board!

Get All the ExEC Online: Express Pack Lesson Plans (Free)

Know an Entrepreneurship Instructor?

If you know anyone who these new lessons might be help, we welcome you to invite them to participate. You can:

Email them this URL: https://bit.ly/ExpressPack
Click here to share on LinkedIn
Click here to share on Facebook

Free Online Entrepreneurship Lesson Plans

March 23, 2020 Justin Wilcox Comments 0 Comment

We know the transition to teaching online can be overwhelming. We want to help.

We’ve fast-tracked a subset of the ExEC Online exercises you’ll be able to use free through June 2020!

The ExEC Online: Express Pack will be a collection of free, interactive, online entrepreneurship lessons available through the rest of this term that you can easily plug into your class.

We’re specifically releasing exercises that are not only engaging, but particularly relevant in this time of dramatic uncertainty:

Problem-Inspired Idea Generation: We know customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems – and right now people’s problems have changed dramatically. This exercise will show your students a systematic way to identify new opportunities inspired by their customer’s real-world problems that is particularly helpful during times of disruption like we’re experiencing right now.
How to Interview Customers: Now that business model assumptions have been flipped on their head, it’s more critical than ever that students learn how to effectively talk to customers to discover what problems they’re facing. A person with the skills to learn about how this new world will effect people individually, is a person that will thrive during this, and any future dramatic changes. This lesson will help students understand how to find customers to talk to, what questions to ask, and most importantly, why asking them will form the basis of a successful business model.
Financial Projection Simulator: With a global recession looming, it’s essential our students understand the elements of a robust financial model, and how to develop a sustainable one. This exercise makes finance approachable by turning what would normally be an overwhelming series of numbers, into a game-like experience that enables students to experiment with many different financial models.
60 Minute MVP: The key to thriving in the face of high uncertainty and limited resources is efficient experimentation. This exercise will show your students how to quickly launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to measure demand for their products/services. Plus, even outside the entrepreneurial context, in a future where online, remote-enabled work will likely be in demand, this is a great opportunity for students to learn how to build websites and create animated videos.

We’ll be making each lesson plan available as soon as it’s finished. If you’re interested in using any of the exercises from the ExEC Online: Express Pack, please fill out the form below.

Due to the accelerated pace we’re releasing these lessons, the first iteration will be designed for use in colleges/universities in the US and Canada. Future iterations will be accessible to students across a wider range of environments.

Regardless of who or where you teach, we welcome you to request access and we’ll notify you if, and as soon as, we’re able to bring your students on board!

Get the ExEC Online: Express Pack

Know a Teacher?

If you know anyone who these new lessons might be help, we welcome you to invite them to participate. You can:

Email them this URL: http://www.teachingentrepreneurship.org/express-pack
Click here to share on LinkedIn
Click here to share on Facebook

Steve Blank: An Interview with Your Questions

January 20, 2019 Justin Wilcox Comments 0 Comment

Steve Blank is one of the most influential people in modern entrepreneurship education, and he wants to answer your questions about teaching entrepreneurship.

In addition to being a successful (and more importantly failed) entrepreneur, Steve is the creator of customer development, an instructor at Stanford, UC Berkeley, NYU and Columbia, the developer of Lean Launchpad and helped popularize the Business Model Canvas. Steve has graciously agreed to speak with us, the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org community, about how he:

Increases student engagement
Helps students conduct high quality customer interviews
Ditches the textbook and makes entrepreneurship classes real
Sees the future of entrepreneurship education

Steve will be accepting the entrepreneurship education lifetime achievement award at this year’s USASBE conference and agreed to sit down for an interview with us about how to continue innovating the way we teach innovation and entrepreneurship.

Interview with Steve Blank

The Future of Real Entrepreneurship Education

Ask Steve anything about entrepreneurship education.

Get your Recording of the Interview

Click here to:

Submit your entrepreneurship education question for Steve
Get a free recording of the interview
Get updates on a possible live stream of the interview

Who is Steve Blank?

Even if you haven’t heard of Steve, you’ve probably heard of some of the tools he’s helped introduce to modern entrepreneurship education:

Steve is first and foremost an entrepreneur, both successful and failed. After his two major entrepreneurial failures, one dotcom home run, and several base hits, he retired from entrepreneurship and began teaching. As he codified what distinguished his entrepreneurial successes from his failures, he developed the process of customer development, which is now the bedrock of much of today’s entrepreneurship education.

Steve has taught customer development at Stanford, Columbia, NYU, and UC Berkeley, at one point teaching a young man named Eric Ries. Ries, inspired by Steve’s customer development framework, combined it with another tool that Steve popularized – Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas – and agile software development to form the three pillars of what would become known as Lean Startup.

Customer development, the Business Model Canvas, and Lean Startup are all possible and/or popularized because of Steve, and have revolutionized the way entrepreneurship is executed and taught throughout the world.

We couldn’t be more excited to sit down with him and ask him your questions, as well as our own, about the future of entrepreneurship education.

Interview with Steve Blank

The Future of Real Entrepreneurship Education

Ask Steve anything about entrepreneurship education

Get your Recording of the Interview

For more on Steve check out his amazing blog or his manifesto on customer development, The Startup Owner’s Manual.

To see a fully experiential entrepreneurship curriculum inspired by Steve’s customer development methodology, check out ExEC.

Get our Next Free Lesson Plan

We email new experiential entrepreneurship lesson plans regularly.

Subscribe here to get our next lesson plan in your inbox!

Wish Game: Entrepreneurship Through Giving Back

December 10, 2018 Justin Wilcox Comments 5 comments

Rebeca Hwang recently introduced us to The Wish Game – an exercise she uses in her E145 Technology Entrepreneurship class at Stanford University. We all want to increase the intensity and success of teamwork in our courses. Through this exercise, Rebeca accomplished just that.

After hearing Rebeca share about this exercise, our co-founder Doan Winkel realized it could be so much more. He saw it as a transformative entrepreneurship training ground. Doan transformed his upcoming MBA class into one semester-long Wish Game. He will be sharing his journey throughout the Spring semester – follow the journey to see how it goes.

The Wish Game As An Exercise

“Every week, I was looking forward to the Wish Game. It created a sense of excitement all around.” – ENGR145 Student

Step 1: Sharing Wishes

On the first day of class, Rebeca asks students to write down three wishes on one piece of paper. She encourages no boundaries here; examples Rebeca shared include meeting Mark Zuckerberg, or getting a job at Google.

Throughout her E145 Technology Entrepreneurship class, Rebeca chooses one person’s paper from a hat and the rest of the class, working as one, fulfills that wish. If one student significantly helps fulfill a wish, that student gets his/her wish fulfilled next. Paying it forward is a critical part of the Wish Game and an overall goal Rebeca has to WOW her students.

In Rebeca’s class, The Wish Game is about hyper-collaboration; if her students work together under considerable constraints, they all benefit.

Step 2: Planning the Wish

When a wish is picked, students interview the student whose wish was picked. Their goal is to dig beneath the surface of the chosen student’s wish. Rebeca reported that often what the chosen student wants isn’t exactly what they wrote on the paper.

Through this process, students build stronger relationships with each other, and understand the hopes and dreams of each other.

Students practice their interviewing skills each week as they work to better understand how to deliver a truly amazing experience for the chosen student.

Through planning and executing wishes, The Wish Game:

pushes students to think about what resources and assets they have,
pushes them to share those with peers
enables students to build lasting relationships, and
enables students to positively impact on each other.

The Wish Game as a Course

“When I heard Rebeca describe The Wish Game, I sat up straight in my chair and began scribbling ideas on my notebook. I immediately understood the potential this exercise had to be the perfect playground for my entrepreneurship students.” – Doan Winkel

Step 1: Sharing Wishes

The first thing Doan will do in Day 1 of his MBA class (held for 3 hours once per week) is to ask students to imagine their three biggest wishes. He will encourage his students to write down the ones that scare them or make them a little giddy when they imagine that reality. To model this, he will share his three big wishes:

Have a conversation with his sister Laura, who died more than 20 years ago
Step foot on Saturn
Hit the winning shot in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game

Step 2: Planning the Wish

Doan will invite students to talk through how they would plan his wish to step foot on Saturn.

He will push them to think creatively about how they would create that scenario. Doan will challenge them to get into an uncomfortable place in terms of what they think they can accomplish and what they think is possible. His main tool here would be “What if . . .” prompts to push the students to think bigger, or to believe they can execute their ideas.

At the end of this discussion, he will lay out the course structure, as follows, for each subsequent week:

Doan will pick a piece of paper at the beginning of Week 2.
Students will select a leader – a student in charge of strategy and execution.
Students interview the chosen student to better understand the desire for the wish, because often what people share about their hopes and dreams is only surface-level. Doan wants his students to practice digging deep beneath that surface to understand the impetus for the wish. By perfecting their interviewing skills, the students will be more capable of delivering value to their “customer” (the student getting the wish granted in this case).
Once students feel they have a good understanding of the true wish, Doan will excuse the chosen student for the week so the remaining students can plan the wish.
Students plan the wish and deliver it at the beginning of the next class (one week later).
Rinse and repeat; Doan chooses another student and the process begins again.
If one student significantly helps fulfill a wish, that student gets his/her wish fulfilled next. Otherwise, Doan will choose another piece of paper for the subsequent week.

Doan will encourage students to mobilize their resources each week. This could take the form of money (he will set the expectation that each student should contribute $10 to each wish). He will help students understand how to use their network. Perhaps people in their network could contribute advice, or materials, or participation.

Step 3: Assessing the Wish

Doan will assess students in two ways.

Each chosen student will write a reflection one-pager, sharing his/her perspective of the experience, and grading the accuracy and the impact of the delivered wish.
Each student who delivered the wish will write a reflection one-pager, sharing his/her perspective of the experience and grading their effort in that wish delivery.

The Wish Game as Entrepreneurship

What excited Doan so much about Rebeca’s Wish Game exercise was the possibility of his students practicing entrepreneurship skills while doing something impactful for others. Each week, students will practice, at minimum, the following skills that are critical elements of entrepreneurship education:

develop and evaluate ideas
interview customers
iteratively prototype under time constraints
mobilize and deploy limited resources
presentation
reflection

We will run a series of blog posts highlighting Doan’s journey throughout his semester-long Wish Game Course this Spring.

Get updates delivered directly to your inbox.

4 Steps to Assessing an Experiential Class

August 13, 2018 Justin Wilcox Comments 2 comments

Experiential teaching is arguably the best way to engage entrepreneurship students. At the same time, classes without textbooks are notoriously difficult to assess:

No multiple choice tests means objective grades are hard to come by
Team & project based-grades cause stress and conflict between students
Grading written reflections is subjective, and doesn’t provide the “grade defensibility” more traditional assignments do
Grade distributions can be difficult to achieve when the focus is on skills as opposed to scores

We’ve spent the last year developing a robust assessment strategy for our textbook-replacing Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC).

With the new academic year upon us, we wanted to share our strategies in time for you to incorporate them.

ExEC’s Assessment Philosophy

Assess Process. Not Progress.

What that Means

Ensuring students understand how to create businesses that fulfill customers’ emotional needs (e.g. solve problems, achieve desires, etc.) via an iterative process consisting of devising and executing experiments to validate assumptions.
As teachers, we have very limited time with students – one, maybe two terms. The businesses they build during their time in school are not going to be their best/last chance at success. Students’ time with us is best spent developing a mindset that prepares them for creating future ventures.

Why We Believe it

A focus on process encourages:

Skill development (not syllabus gaming)
Meaningful learning about the market, customers, problems, etc. (not inflating/falsifying numbers/results)
An experimental entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial mindset they can leverage regardless of where their career takes them

How We Achieve it

Evaluating students’ understanding and implementation of the business model validation process through:

Out-of-class exercises
Written reflections
Presentations
Small-group meetings with instructors

What Not To Assess:

Achieving “Product-Market Fit” or “Problem Validation.” Often times the best outcomes for business model experiments is determining the model isn’t worth pursuing in its current design. Students should be rewarded, not penalized, for invalidating their assumptions, even if it means they don’t validate a problem during their interviews, or generate revenue during their demand tests.
Number of interviews conducted. While students conducting very few interviews (e.g. < 5) aren’t demonstrating an understanding of the business model validation process, a high number of interviews doesn’t correlate to high comprehension of the process. In fact, in many cases, not being able to find customers to interview is a great way to invalidate assumptions. Avoid assessing students on the number of interviews they conduct, and instead, focus on the process they used to try to acquire their interviews, what they learned during their interviews, and how that informed their future hypotheses.
Number of paying customers or revenue generated. Putting emphasis here will incentivize students to alter the results of their experiments. Instead, we want to encourage students to run objective experiments, and report out on their actual results, even, and especially, if that means their experiments “fail.” Emphasizing their process, over their progress, will decrease students’ fear of failure, and encourage a more risk-tolerant and innovative mindset.
The originality or innovativeness of the idea. Assessing originality and innovativeness can be extremely subjective. Moreover, the focus of ExEC is to show students a process they can use to create successful businesses that solve problems. The solutions do not necessarily have to be original or innovative to solve a problem or teach students a process.

What To Assess:

Student’s ability to:

Effectively recruit prospective customers for business model validation experiments.
Design and execute business model validation experiments like demand testing, customer interviewing, etc.
Conduct interviews to understand the emotional perspective of their customers.
Use information from business validation experiments to devise and iterate possible solutions to their customer’s problems.
Assess the financial viability of their solution.
Describe their validation journey and understanding of the process.

An overview on how we implement our philosophy is below.

Assignments and Rubrics

There are four steps to the ExEC assessment model, all of which are graded on the following scale:

Full Credit: means the student demonstrates a consistent and complete understanding of, and ability to apply, the validation principles underlying the assignment.
Partial Credit: is given when students demonstrate an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the underlying principles, or difficulty applying the principles.
No Credit: is given when students demonstrate a lack of willingness to learn, or apply, the underlying principles of the exercise.

Instructors are given the freedom to implement this scale as they see fit (e.g. a points system, A-F grades, etc.). Details on the specific steps of ExEC’s assessment model below:

Step 1: Exercises

Written assignments students complete outside of class that help them design and execute their business model validation experiments.

There are 29 exercises students do outside of class during a typical 15-week ExEC course. So as to not overwhelm our instructors, we recommend they assess most exercises with a simple complete/incomplete scale, based on good faith effort. We do however call out four exercises that are worth assessing thoroughly:

Business Plans vs Business Experiments: A written, or recorded, reflection on their Tower Building Challenge, where students educate a fictitious friend about the dangers of hidden assumptions and the power of experimentation and iteration. Why we grade this thoroughly:
1. First exercise of the class.
2. Demonstrates students’ understanding of the pros and cons of business planning versus business model validation.
3. Underscores the importance of experimentation, which they will be assessed on repeatedly throughout the class.
Your Early Adopters: This exercise demonstrates the difference between Early Adopters, Early Majority, et al., and helps students identify who they should conduct problem interviews to increase the efficacy of their outreach. Why grade this thoroughly:
1. Basis for student interviews. If they don’t get this right, much of the rest of their exercises will falter.
2. Will highlight the importance of empathizing with customers, which they will be assessed over and over throughout the course.
3. Key principle of entrepreneurship.
Customer Interview Analysis & Interview Transcripts: In these exercises, students record and transcribe (via automated transcription tools) each of their customer interviews, and build affinity maps to highlight the patterns in their qualitative data. Why we grade this thoroughly:
1. Demonstrates students’ ability to conduct customer interviews.
2. Demonstrates students’ ability to empathize with customers.
3. Demonstrates students’ ability to do qualitative analysis.
4. Will determine future experiments.
Experiment Design Template: This exercise asks students to design an experiment to test their Business Model’s riskiest assumption, including how they’ll execute the experiment, how long it will take to execute, what the success and failure metrics are, and what their next steps are based on the potential outcomes of the experiment. Why we grade this thoroughly:
1. Demonstrates students’ ability to identify the riskiest assumptions of their business model.
2. Demonstrates students’ understanding of effective success metric definition.
3. Demonstrates students’ ability to design and execute experiments that test falsifiable hypotheses.

Step 2: Validation Check-Ins

Short, 10 minute meetings between our instructors and individual teams where instructors assess a team’s understanding and application of the validation process, and help them overcome specific challenges they’re facing designing/executing their experiments.

Each check-in’s assessment focuses on four elements:

Criteria

Preparedness: students completed and brought all required materials.

Empathy: students were able to understand the emotions driving their customers’ pains/gains, and utilize that understanding to effectively resolve their customers’ needs.

Experimentation: students effectively hypothesized falsifiable assumption and design, and implement experiments to test those assumptions.

Overall Process Execution: students effectively demonstrates an awareness of why they are taking a given step in the validation process, understand how it will lead to their next validation step, and execute those steps effectively

Step 3: Business Model Journal

A collection of Business Model Canvas iterations, and written reflections, detailing each student’s business model assumptions, experiments, and learnings throughout the course.

Unlike courses that produce a single Business Model Canvas at the end, ExEC students iterate their canvas upwards of 10 times throughout a course based on the experiments they run. Each iteration of their canvas is accompanied by a short reflection describing:

What hypothesis the students tested this week
The experiment they ran to test the hypothesis
The results of that experiment
How those results influence the experiment they’ll run next

Instructors can use this written history of each student’s validation journey, to assess how well the student understands and applies the validation process individually – independently of the contributions of their teammates.

Step 4: Process Pitch

A presentation of each team’s validation journey during the course, including all of their (in)validated assumptions, emphasizing their ability to execute the validation process, more than the final outcome of the business.

Students wrap up the ExEC course with a pitch, but not a traditional product-centric, Shark Tank-style pitch; this pitch is process-centric.

More important than the outcome of any single experiment, or grade on any one assignment, is helping students learn an entrepreneurial mindset – a process they can use to repeatedly use to solve problems of the people they want to serve.

This pitch not only helps instructors assess how well students understand the validation process, it will reinforcement one more time, the most important principles of that process:

Empathy
Experimentation

Exams

ExEC does not include any exams, choosing instead to focus student efforts on out-of-class projects. ExEC is however compatible with exams when appropriate or required by an institution.

For midterm or final exams, we recommend presenting students with a scenario and asking them to describe what should be done next. For example:

Illustrate the focal venture’s business model using the BMC. Students can also be asked to create different version of the BMC based on changes in a key aspect of the business model (e.g., customer segment).
Creating an interview guide (who to interview, where to find them, what to ask)
Identify the riskiest assumption of the focal venture’s business model and design an experiment to test it (what assumption to test, specifics of the experiment design, metric to track success)

For possible scenarios/cases that can be used for an exam, consider the following:

EcoWash: A business opportunity worth pursuing?
An episode of the podcast “The Pitch.” In each episode of this podcast, real entrepreneurs are pitching their ventures to real investors.
A news article about a newly-opened venture started by a local entrepreneur. (As an illustration, here is an article about an entrepreneur who started a shoe cleaning service). The business page of the local newspaper is a great source for possible scenarios.

Thoughts? Feedback?

That is the overview of the ExEC experiential assessment model. If you have any feedback, or suggestions on how to improve it, we’re all ears. Please leave a comment below.

We’d love to hear how you structure assessment in your experiential class.

On the other hand, if you…

Want Structured Assessment in your Class?

If you like the engaging of power of experiential teaching, and are looking for a structured approach to assessment, request your preview of ExEC today.

It only takes a couple days to get a feel for the material, and get your course set up to use it. If you’d like to try ExEC for your upcoming term, take a look today.

Student Entrepreneur Spotlight: Uber for Women

July 9, 2018 Justin Wilcox Comments 0 Comment

“We had our minds set on getting a job after graduation, and now we have something on our plate that is really exciting to think about growing.”

Julia, Hannah and Jennifer
ExEC Entrepreneurs

What if Your Course Changed the Career Trajectory of Your Students?

That’s what happened to Dr. Emma Fleck at Susquehanna University, and her students Julia Bodner, Hannah Gruber, and Jennifer Thorsheim.

Using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) in their Fall 2017 course taught by Dr. Emma Fleck, Julia, Hannah, and Jennifer discovered skills and confidence they didn’t know they had, created a business, and won an all-expenses-paid trip to the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota to present their business in e-Fest and the Schulze Entrepreneurship Challenge.

We are hearing similar stories from entrepreneurship classrooms around the world using ExEC as their curriculum. The learning is lasting. The experience is dynamic. The students are transformed.

If you want engaged students and a classroom alive with ideas and passion and growth, check out our curriculum. If you’re not convinced, let us tell you a story . . .

Students Become Entrepreneurs

Prior to Dr. Fleck’s course, Julia, Jen and Hannah “were a little nervous when [they] got the assignment of creating a company”. They didn’t think they were creative enough, and had reservations going into the course.

Dr. Fleck urged her students to solve problems that were personal to them; one of the early lessons in ExEC is using ideation exercises to discover a problem to solve. Jennifer flashed back to a recent experience:

She was in London, traveling on the tube, and was followed home by a strange man. She told her parents, who urged her to take an Uber next time she was traveling, so she did. That experience was no better; her driver was being “really weird”, telling her she looked like his ex-girlfriend, and in general creating a very uncomfortable atmosphere for Jennifer.

The ideation exercises in the ExEC curriculum, combined with the existence of a threat for women traveling alone, sparked an “Uber for women” idea for the three young women. They became very passionate about developing a business providing safe transportation for women on college campuses. And Fairy Godmother was born!

In their words,

“we wanted to bring this issue to light and attack it where we can. College campuses are a really big party scene, obviously, with people taking Ubers and taxis home after nights out, and we hear way too many stories about women in uncomfortable situations. We just wanted to try and alleviate that and fix [the problem].”

During the course they navigated collecting interview and survey data, building and iterating a business model, and struggled through financial projections. They found ExEC and the course beneficial because

“it took us step-by-step through the process; at every stage, we felt comfortable moving forward. The way the course was set up really helped us.”

Students Love ExEC!

In this short video, Julia, Jen and Hannah explain what using ExEC meant to them. This is the student feedback every teacher dreams of! You can get it with ExEC.

In the video above, the Fairy Godmothers explain the value of their ExEC course!

ExEC will teach your students to create a startup just like Fairy Godmother. Click on the image below to check out their Unbounce landing page, which they created using the 60 Minute MVP exercise from ExEC to create this landing page.

Your Students Can Compete!

Julia, Jennifer and Hannah entered Fairy Godmother in the annual e-fest/Schulze Entrepreneurship Challenge event, and were selected as finalists!

Although they were nominated for the Social Impact and the Global Impact Awards, Fairy Godmother left empty-handed in terms of awards and funding. But they left with something much more important – confidence!

The experience gave them validation that they were capable of building something from their ideas; judges and other students sought them out individually to encourage them to push forward.

The Final Results

Dr. Fleck used ExEC to lead Jen, Julia and Hannah to identify a problem they are passionate about solving, conduct research and customer interviews, build out a landing page and develop a business and financial model. This experience gave them confidence and a toolkit with which they can excel in the world. Your students can have too – sign up to use ExEC today!

Your Impact Will Grow Beyond Your Course

Julia, Jennifer, and Hannah experienced a different senior year spring semester than their friends. They certainly were thinking about a job and life post-college. But because of their experience in Dr. Fleck’s class, they also were thinking about next steps with their business.

They continued working on their business model and landed on a licensing model for college campuses, charging a flat fee and also taking a percentage of each fare.

They knew another group of students would be going through Dr. Fleck’s course, using the same ExEC curriculum, learning from the same (amazing!) professor. Julia, Jen and Hannah began thinking about passing along part of their business to this new batch of students. They would stay involved, but they also would get new energy and ideas. The Fairy Godmother team is working on the legalities of licensing, delving into the murky waters of financials, and putting together a plan to enable more students to help them take their business to the next level.

As they told us,

“the next steps of the business aren’t as scary; the class and the experience makes entrepreneurship less scary.”

After their experience, they knew they could overcome the uncertainty they would encounter, and could navigate the boulders in their path. These women were not as afraid to take risks and stood a little taller as they faced the challenges of entrepreneurship and of life after college.

Looking Back

Julia, Jennifer, and Hannah entered an undergraduate entrepreneurship course like most of our students do – nervously excited about the unknown. The ExEC curriculum and Dr. Fleck’s caring guidance delivered these women a experience that changed them in unimaginable ways. Specifically, the main skills they honed in the course were:

Problem Solving: “We learned how to find a problem and to think of a viable solution to bring to market.”
Creativity: “We thought we weren’t creative, but we discovered that we definitely are.”
Teamwork: “We were good friends, but never worked in a team. This class forced us to work together and perform under a lot of pressure.”
Risk-tolerance: “We feel more comfortable taking risks now.”

Julia, Jennifer and Hannah experienced what we all hope our students experience in our courses. They learned real skills and how to apply them to real life. They learned they can accomplish big goals, that they never thought possible. They experimented, they failed, they launched, and they grew, as individuals and as a team:

“None of us were thinking we could be entrepreneurs, and now we all feel like we can [be entrepreneurs]!”

You Can Use ExEC this Fall

When planning for your fall entrepreneurship courses, consider our comprehensive, structured curriculum; ExEC’s 25+ detailed lesson plans, exercises, and assessments provide the foundation for your entrepreneurship course, so you can teach real-world entrepreneurial skills like:

Idea generation
Problem validation
Customer interviews
MVP development
and more…

…in a rigorous way, that can be consistently assessed.

Request a preview of the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum today and make this Fall the most engaging semester of entrepreneurship yet!

Get More Exercises

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Image Insights: Teaching Opportunity Identification

June 4, 2018 Justin Wilcox Comments 0 Comment

Show your students there are plenty of entrepreneurship opportunities in their everyday lives!

In the video above, Jennifer explains her exercise for helping students identify opportunities!

This exercise will help your students:

Find entrepreneurial opportunities through the eyes of current startups
Learn to pay close attention to the world around them
See their daily experiences through an entrepreneurial lens

This article is a collaboration with Jennifer Capps, the Director of Student Learning and Faculty Development for NC State Entrepreneurship at North Carolina State University.

Jennifer developed this exercise for interdisciplinary entrepreneurial thinkers at any level. It can be easily adjusted in terms of difficulty and lessons learned to meet the needs of undergraduate or graduate students, business or humanities students, scientists or artists, etc. Jennifer has used this exercise successfully with groups ranging from 20-100 participants.

Jennifer’s complete lesson plan is available to download below, but here’s an overview.

Round 1: Identify

Randomly assign your students into groups of 3-4, provide them a photo of an everyday scene, like these:

You want to give the same photos to multiple groups – ideally each picture has at least 3 groups working with it. With photos in hand, give the groups the following assignment:

Based on the image that has been provided to your team, conduct a brief 3-4 minute search to identify at least 3 interesting entrepreneurial ventures that have a product or service that is impacting your given scene.

You want students looking for things that exist that relate to the scene in the photograph. For instance, in a wedding scene, you want them talking about Zola, Vow to Be Chic, etc.

Students will feel a bit lost. Encourage them to just get started – express a sense of urgency!

Round 1: Present and Discuss

Have each group show their picture and quickly present the companies they found and the pain/problem those companies are solving. Write the companies on a board or a slide, categorized by the image.

Groups looking at the same image will inevitably overlap the companies they found. They’ve done a quick Google search (“startups in the wedding industry”) and selected the top results that seemed to match.

The aha moment happens when the 2nd or 3rd team waiting to present on an image keeps hearing the same companies that they found. They realize they didn’t dig deep enough – encourage them to share this.

Possible discussion points:

What differentiates a non-entrepreneurial company from an entrepreneurial company
Are students presenting a solution or a pain/problem?
How deep did you actually go in terms of seeking out entrepreneurial opportunities in your scene?
How much time did you spend critically thinking about this concept versus just trying to get the assignment done?
How could you push yourself to go further?
How to put a fresh twist on ideas that already exist in the marketplace

Check out Jennifer’s lesson plan below for full details!

Round 2: Identify

Give students a second chance. Tell them they will do the exact same thing, but that every company and pain/problem that was brought up in Round 1 is off limits. Encourage your students to not restrict themselves to just the image they are seeing. Encourage them to think about what went into creating that image – what had to happen to make whatever is happening in that image happen, etc. Encourage them to focus on what’s going on in the background, to think about what will happen next after that photo.

The goal is for students to learn to expand the way they think about opportunities in the world around them. And also to learn that opportunities grow when they move beyond the easy answers that are right in front of their nose.

Round 2 Present and Debrief

Have each group show their picture and quickly present the companies they found and the pain/problem those companies are solving. Write the companies on a board or a slide, categorized by the image.

Contrast how much more creative and impactful these ideas are than those from Round 1.

Also point out how much stronger the students were in their critical thinking when they’re encouraged to go beyond their comfort zone and not take the easy path.

Specific questions to consider asking:

During round 1, how easy/difficult did you find the opportunity identification process? Why?
When you heard all of the round 1 pain points/entrepreneurial ventures, how do you feel that your ideas compared to others? Why?
Did you originally navigate to the more obvious options in your image or did you naturally apply a deeper level of critical thinking?
When you were told to perform the activity again with the stated restrictions, how did you feel? Why? (some common reactions tend to be scared, intimidated, excited, challenged, and overwhelmed)
How easy/difficult did you find round 2? Why?
Once you were told to look beyond the exact image that you were given, what did you learn? How can this lesson translate to your everyday life as an entrepreneurial thinker?

Key Takeaways

Through this exercise, students will learn to see opportunities all around them! They will also see that thinking deeper and more critically is not as difficult as they thought. Some student reflections from Jennifer’s class:

“Even if a company currently exists similar to your idea, rather than abandoning it you should dig deeper and find what they’re missing.”

“The Image Insights Activity that was conducted during one of our class periods, completely changed my perspective. During this activity, each group was asked to look at an image of something ordinary in everyday life and think of three startup businesses that have thrived due to this scene. My group was told to look at an image of people walking through an airport. Within this one image we were able to research companies that dealt with issues along the lines of traveling, packing, a place to stay, better service on planes and within the airport itself, etc. Because of this activity, I was made aware that if you look deeper, you can find a startup in almost anything that shapes our everyday lives.”

Get the “Image Insights” Lesson Plan

We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Image Insights” exercise to walk you, and your students through the process, step-by-step.

Get the Lesson Plan

It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.

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Observe Customers Where They Are

May 28, 2018 Justin Wilcox Comments 0 Comment

Are your students shy about conducting customer interviews?

Do your students struggle collecting information about problems from customer interviews?

Observing customers is another great way to gather customer information. In some important ways, it can provide even more and different information than an interview.

This Fly On The Wall exercise:

Introduces your students to a powerful tool to gather information on customers’ experience in real-life situations. This allows them to avoid predicting customer behavior by actually observing it. Because actions speak louder than words.
Allows students to practice listening with their eyes, to understand what people value and what they don’t. Because behavior doesn’t always match what people think they will do.

Observing customers in natural settings is a powerful experience for students. They discover new business opportunities. They increase their customer empathy. They hone their behavioral analysis skills. All critical entrepreneurial competencies!

Students going through this exercise learn a technique to gain insight into the small details of a customer’s interaction with their environment that a customer may not think to express in interviews.

This exercise will span two class periods. For more details, check out our Fly On The Wall lesson plan below.

Class 1: Step 1 – Redesigning a Product

Most students will enter your class with no clue how to effectively observe customers in their natural environment. Before teaching them how to do so, we want them to understand why it is such a valuable skill. So we kick off the customer observation class with the Toothbrush Exercise, which teaches students that:

Entrepreneurs can’t trust numbers alone. In order to improve the world, we must see, feel and experience it for ourselves!

Quick steps for this exercise:

Organize students into groups of 4-5
Show this picture on the screen
Tell students (& write on board/slide) the average adult male hand, is 7.44″ long (measured from tip of the middle finger to the wrist) and 3.30” wide (measured across the palm). The average adult female hand size is 6.77″ long and 2.91 inches wide. The average child hand size is 5.5” long and 2.75” wide. (You can also give each group cutouts if you are feeling adventurous!)
Give each team an adult toothbrush and tell them they have 5 minutes to design the best-selling child’s toothbrush (they must include the dimensions in their design)

After their 5 minutes elapse, ask how many groups made a smaller toothbrush? Now play this video:

After trying to design a toothbrush for kids the wrong way, this video will drive home the point that the goal isn’t to make toothbrushes smaller for kids, but to actually make them bigger!

For more details on this exercise, check out our Fly On The Wall lesson plan below.

Class 1: Step 2 – Making It Real

The homework consists of two steps. Step 1 is to watch the video below (click the image to launch the video) about the product development process, and read through Examples 1-3 here about how to make things people want.

Step 2 is for students, in groups, to observe customers for 20 minutes in a campus location where people are active. For instance, dining hall/food court, gym/rec center, makerspace, athletic facilities, etc. The point of this homework assignment is for students to observe students actively interacting with some products (gym, makerspace) or business (food court). In other words, you don’t want them observing students in the library, where they are likely to be sedentary.

Direct your students to take note, individually, of anything they observe about their subjects, without interacting with them. Each student needs to individually write down the following based on their own observation:

At least 3 problems that can be solved that they observed
At least 10 new things they discovered during their observation

Class 2: Step 1 – Debrief

Start the next class with groups reporting what they observed. You will find students’ observations will likely focus on:

Surface-level activity, such as “students were talking to each other” or “students were exercising“
The perspective of the product or business, such as “there were not enough seats in the food court” or “many treadmills were not in use“

We want these observations, because it’s the perfect way to illustrate how to conduct useful observations. For a debrief of their homework, ask students how they can use the information they gathered during observations to develop products/ideas they could bring to market.

Students will not write down questions they will try to answer prior to the observation, or define major themes to look for. They will observe without planning a framework.

The aha moment we want them to realize is that they need a plan to effectively observe customers.

During the debrief, stress:

Focus observations on the subjects’ problems (empathize)
Identifying patterns where subjects struggle to do something
Capturing images and/or video during observations

For more details on this debrief, check out our Fly On The Wall lesson plan below.

Class 2: Step 2 – Planning

The final step is for students to plan an observation they will conduct as homework in the same campus location they observed as homework after Class 1. Remind students to create a framework that includes:

Questions they want to answer, and
Themes they can look for

For homework, students should conduct that observation, again writing down the following based on their own observation:

At least 3 problems that can be solved that they observed
At least 10 new things they discovered during their observation

They should notice a significant difference between their observations after Class 1 and Class 2.

This extended series of exercises gives students valuable skills to add to their entrepreneurial toolkit: customer observations and behavioral analysis.

Get the “Fly On The Wall” Lesson Plan

We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Fly On The Wall” exercise to walk you, and your students through the process, step-by-step.

Get the Lesson Plan

It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.

What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we talk about our evolving experiential curriculum, how to teach students about approaching and mitigating risk, and how to enable your students to better identify opportunities!

Subscribe here to get our next lesson plan in your inbox.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

May 14, 2018 Justin Wilcox Comments 0 Comment

You’re an innovative professor. You read blog posts about teaching entrepreneurship because…

You care about engaging your students.

It’s the same reason you’re always on the lookout for new tools to integrate into your class, and it’s the reason you’ve thought about (or have) ditched your textbook in favor of your own lesson plans.

The downside is, creating your own experiential curriculum from scratch is:

Time consuming. Researching and developing a full course of high-quality lesson plans that teach real-world skills, and are assessable, takes a massive on-going investment.
Disjointed. Every new tool you integrate into class runs the risk of creating a more inconsistent experience for students.
Redundant. This work has been done by others, it doesn’t make sense for you to roll your own from scratch.

So instead of starting from scratch, consider building on a strong foundation…

ExEC: Structured Experiential Curriculum

We’ve spent the last two years developing, and testing, the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) – a comprehensive, and structured, curriculum.

Because ExEC is written by a unified team of modern entrepreneurship teachers who practice what we teach. ExEC provides a consistent structure throughout 15-weeks of exercises:

ExEC’s 25+ detailed lesson plans, exercises, and assessments provide the foundation for your entrepreneurship course, so you can teach real-world intra/entre-preneurial skills like:

Idea generation
Problem validation
Customer interviews
MVP development
and more…

…in a rigorous way, that can be consistently assessed.

Classroom-Tested

ExEC has been tested with thousands of students at dozens of Universities, including:

The results demonstrate the power of a structured, experiential approach. One student said:

“[ExEC] made me look at the creation of a product in a different aspect than I have before. It allowed me to think of solving a problem and not just creating a product to create one. It needs to be something that people will actually use. It made it easier for me to be creative and think more like an entrepreneur.”

Similarly, one professor reported:

“More than anything, I’ve enjoyed that we have spent 4-5 weeks exploring the issue of problem solving. In previous classes, students have been convinced they had the right solution to a problem by week 2 and no matter what research they found, they wouldn’t pivot appropriately given the new evidence.”

But like we teach our students, positive responses don’t mean we’re done. To ensure we continue innovating, we’re constantly on the hunt for new resources to include, and improvements to make, so…

ExEC is Always Up To Date

We collect feedback from students and professors on every exercise in ExEC, about how it felt completing, and teaching it:

We use that data to inform what changes we need to make to ExEC for the next semester. With ExEC, you’ll always provide your students with relevant, and engaging, experiences.

Collaborate with Other Professors

When you use ExEC, you’ll also join a community of other modern professors using the curriculum so you can ask questions:

And share best practices and success stories:

Don’t Go It Alone

If you want to teach real-world, entrepreneurship skills in an experiential way…

You are not alone.

There’s a growing group of professors out there like you, and we’re here to help!

ExEC can be the structured, experiential curriculum that forms the foundation of your course. Next semester, spend less time compiling disparate resources, and more time consistently helping your students develop and apply their entrepreneurial mindset.

Try ExEC this Fall

Request a preview of the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum today and make this Fall the most engaging semester of entrepreneurship yet!

Making Finance Fun

Encourage Experimentation

Engage Your Students

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Idea Generation is a Skill

3 Steps to Better Ideas

Engage Your Students

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Interview with Steve Blank

The Future of Real Entrepreneurship Education

Who is Steve Blank?

Interview with Steve Blank

The Future of Real Entrepreneurship Education

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The Wish Game As An Exercise

Step 1: Sharing Wishes

Step 2: Planning the Wish

The Wish Game as a Course

Step 1: Sharing Wishes

Step 2: Planning the Wish

Step 3: Assessing the Wish

The Wish Game as Entrepreneurship

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ExEC’s Assessment Philosophy

What that Means

Why We Believe it

How We Achieve it

What Not To Assess:

What To Assess:

Assignments and Rubrics

Step 1: Exercises

Step 2: Validation Check-Ins

Step 3: Business Model Journal

Step 4: Process Pitch

Exams

Thoughts? Feedback?

Want Structured Assessment in your Class?

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What if Your Course Changed the Career Trajectory of Your Students?

Students Become Entrepreneurs

Students Love ExEC!

Your Students Can Compete!

The Final Results

Your Impact Will Grow Beyond Your Course

Looking Back

You Can Use ExEC this Fall

Get More Exercises

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Show your students there are plenty of entrepreneurship opportunities in their everyday lives!

Round 1: Identify

Round 1: Present and Discuss

Round 2: Identify

Round 2 Present and Debrief

Key Takeaways

Get the “Image Insights” Lesson Plan

Get More Exercises

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Class 1: Step 1 – Redesigning a Product

Class 1: Step 2 – Making It Real

Class 2: Step 1 – Debrief

Class 2: Step 2 – Planning

Get the “Fly On The Wall” Lesson Plan

What’s Next?

Want More Engaging Exercises?

ExEC: Structured Experiential Curriculum

Classroom-Tested

ExEC is Always Up To Date

Collaborate with Other Professors

Don’t Go It Alone