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.
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
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
Want To Follow Doan’s Journey?
We will run a series of blog posts highlighting Doan’s journey throughout his semester-long Wish Game Course this Spring.
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
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:
First exercise of the class.
Demonstrates students’ understanding of the pros and cons of business planning versus business model validation.
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:
Basis for student interviews. If they don’t get this right, much of the rest of their exercises will falter.
Will highlight the importance of empathizing with customers, which they will be assessed over and over throughout the course.
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:
Demonstrates students’ ability to conduct customer interviews.
Demonstrates students’ ability to empathize with customers.
Demonstrates students’ ability to do qualitative analysis.
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:
Demonstrates students’ ability to identify the riskiest assumptions of their business model.
Demonstrates students’ understanding of effective success metric definition.
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:
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.
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
For more in our continuing series of free classroom resources, subscribe below.
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.
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!
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!
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
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.
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.
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…
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!
You Are Invited Into an Entrepreneurship Classroom
Join us for the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Digital Conference and you will work live with Julie’s students at Millikin University on an exercise focused on estimation, iteration, and failure.
Watch Julie teach a real lesson, with real students, during the conference!
In this session, you will:
Watch Julie teach her iteration, experimentation and failure exercise in real-time
See how Julie’s students respond in real-time
Interact with, and provide feedback to, Julie and her students
Are you looking for exciting tools and exercises to engage your students and enrich your classroom? You are why we created our Digital Conference Experiment!
Register with discount code DigitalConferenceMVP for a 50% discount!
Julie is Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Millikin University, is an entrepreneur through the historic farm she owns, and is an educator whose energy and passion for igniting students’ entrepreneurial spirit will leave you wanting more!
Join us for this unique digital conference format; we will guide you through experimenting with the tools and exercises to:
Enable your students to work on big ideas
Engage your students in entrepreneurial skills and mindset
Help your students with problem validation.
At this conference, you won’t learn by listening, you’ll learn by doing!
How to create a true entrepreneurial experience for your students
In the video above Doan explains his exercise for getting comfortable thinking creatively!
If you want your students to get truly excited about your class from the first day, or refresh your own experience as a teacher, read on!
This exercise will get your students feeling:
The creative energy that comes with brainstorming a new business model
The anxiety of making a sales pitch
The exhilaration of making their first sale
The inspiration that comes from seeing they too can build a profitable business
In this exercise, we explore the question: How can we provide students a true entrepreneurial experience within a classroom context? In other words, how can we make it real?
“The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.”
– Seymour Papert
This article is a collaboration with Dr. Doan Winkel, the John J. Kahl, Sr. Chair in Entrepreneurship and Director of the Edward M. Muldoon Center for Entrepreneurship at John Carroll University (and co-founder of TeachingEntrepreneurship.org). He developed this exercise so his students with had a powerful learning experience about entrepreneurship during the first moments of his course.
Doan developed this exercise to provide his students with the opportunity to experience entrepreneurship on the very first day of my entrepreneurship course. Students are placed in a situation that reflects many of the pressures, constraints, and reward incentives of new business creation in a compressed 30 minute time frame.
Doan’s complete lesson plan is available to download below, but here’s a quick overview.
Step 1: The Set Up
Scout out a location with plenty of shops and foot traffic. You’ll want this location to be nearby so students don’t lose too much time traveling. Doan gets students off campus so it feels more “real”, but some educators may be able to conduct the exercise on campus depending on the density of stores and foot traffic.
This location is where the class will meet on the first day. Once you decide on a location, be sure to get the word out to students regarding when and where to meet soon after registration begins. Send a selfie at the meeting spot, Google Maps coordinates, and anything else to help students find you on the first day of class. Email students reminders multiple times, including the day before classes start, to make sure you inform students as they add and drop courses. In case anyone does not get the message, put a notice in your classroom reminding students that the first meeting was offsite and to wait in the classroom until everyone returns – about 45 minutes.
You will be grouping students into teams of four, so get enough cash in $1 bills so that every team can start with $10.
Be sure to confirm with your institution that you are allowed to give students cash to use in the exercise
If your institution does not allow you to provide the cash, also let students know they need to bring 2 or 3 $1 bills with them the first day of class (depending on team size you will use).
Step 2: Class-time
Meet your students at the chosen location, team them up in groups of 4 as they arrive, and hand 10 $1 bills to each group.
Step 3: Announce the challenge
Teams have 30 minutes to make as much money as they can, legally. Whichever team makes the most profit, keeps all the money from all the groups.
Winner takes all!
Don’t provide any other specific guidance. Students will want to ask questions. Don’t answer them – walk away after reminding them to meet you back in the classroom in 35 minutes.
Step 4: Debrief
As teams arrive in the classroom, note on the board the profit made by each group and collect their money. Determine the winning team and disperse the winnings.
Start a debrief about the experience, starting with the winning team.
Questions to address can include:
How did they arrive at decisions? Negotiate? Pivot their business idea?
Did students work individually or as a team? Why?
How did the ambiguity feel?
How did it feel using someone else’s capital?
How did they identify a market need?
How did they identify and connect with customers?
See the complete lesson plan below for more ideas and topics to cover.
Results
Hopefully many will feel excited and motivated by the learning experience and competition. This will provide the following benefits:
Get students excited about class from day 1
Get your students feeling the emotions of entrepreneurship: excitement, anxiety, confidence, inspiration
Re-energize yourself with a more experiential class
Build familiarity and bonding amongst students.
Identify students who need more support with this teaching style.
By having students go through this exercise early in the course schedule, you can draw on their experiences when developing ideas throughout the term.
In addition, the exercise
creates a unique experience for students on the first day of class,
sets the tone for things to come, and
gets everyone (including you!) out into the world for some real learning in real time
Get the “Making It Real” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Making It Real” exercise to walk you, and your students through the process, step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.
Companies aren’t built in classrooms. They’re built in often ambiguous and rapidly evolving markets with limited resources while imposing tremendous pressures on founders. Let your students discover what strengths they bring to a team of entrepreneurs.
If you want to learn and practice exercises to better engage your students and learn how to assess experiential learning, join us on May 10th. Jim Hart, Julienne Shields, and our very own Justin Wilcox will use our unique digital conference format to guide you through experimenting with the tools and exercises they introduce to:
Enable your students to work on big ideas
Engage your students in entrepreneurial skills and mindset
Help your students with problem validation.
At this conference, you won’t learn by listening, you’ll learn by doing!
This exercise will help your students develop more creative ideas and more creative solutions to problems!
How do we Teach Creative Confidence?
In the video above Jim Hart explains his exercise for getting comfortable thinking creatively!
This article is a collaboration with Jim Hart at Southern Methodist University, who developed this exercise to enable students to be more confident thinking creatively by breaking through their fear/judgment barriers. This exercises teaches students how to recognize what an impulse feels like, and to allow themselves to follow an impulse without judging or fearing it.
Jim’s complete lesson plan is available to download below, but here’s a quick overview.
The Set-up
To help students feel more comfortable being uncomfortable, show a clip from “Whose Line is it Anyway?” demonstrating improvisation theater, like this one:
Tell your students that this exercise will help become more creative, so they can work on the ideas that matter to them and that will challenge them because they are more creative ideas.
Tell the students that you’re all going to play a fun game like what you just showed them in the clip, where you may all look a little foolish. Encourage them to allow themselves to look a bit foolish.
Because students may feel a bit uncomfortable during this exercise, you need to
Create an atmosphere where it is safe to be open-minded and say anything.
Explicitly tell your students they will not be graded on this exercise.Reassure them that each of them has really creative ideas in them, but that most of us struggle to be creative publicly because we are afraid of sounding or looking foolish.
Attempt #1
Place students standing in a circle, facing inward. Randomly pick two students. One is Student A, the other Student B, and they exchange as follows:
B: “What are you doing?”
A: [says a random activity – for instance, “eating a banana”]
B: [mimes the activity A just mentioned]
A: “What are you doing?”
B: [says a random activity – for instance, “riding a bicycle”]
A: [mimes the activity B just mentioned]
B: “What are you doing?”
The two students continue to do this until one of them pauses in answering the “What are you doing?” question. When one pauses, make a buzzer noise and tell that student he/she is out. Go to the next student in the circle, and they begin again with the remaining student from the original pair.
What typically happens is that students worry about what their peers are thinking and so are consistently and quickly buzzed out of the exercise.
Prep for Attempt #2
After roughly 20 minutes, stop Attempt #1. Tell the students the following story:
In the movie The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise plays an American Civil War hero who is brought to Japan to fight and defeat the samurai. He is eventually captured and the samurai take him to their camp in the mountains. Winter arrives and Cruise is stuck at the samurai camp until the winter weather passes. The samurai start teaching Cruise their ways, but he cannot compete with their sword skills.
Play the following clip:
Tell your students they are minding too much, that you don’t want them using their mind.
Encourage your students to let their impulses guide their words.
Get your students excited by telling them that you will teach them a technique to dramatically increase the time they can last in this exercise, and that they will reap the following benefits:
They will become more effective communicators.
They will develop more creative ideas for solutions to problems.
Attempt #2
Stand in the circle of students. Have your students close their eyes and imagine they are sitting in a movie theater, looking at a movie screen. That screen is their mind’s eye, and they will see images on it. Tell them you will say a word and they should allow the image to pop onto the movie screen in front of them; they should allow the image to pop into their mind.
Ask your students to say “got it” when they’ve got an image of the word you say in their mind.
Say “apple” [students say “got it”]. Say “tire” [students say “got it”], say “desk”, “blue sky”, “birds”, “samurai” (each time waiting until the students say “got it”).
Have your students to open their eyes. Stand in front of each student and ask them to nod when they have the word you’ll say to them in their mind’s eye. Say a random word to each student, wait until they nod, then move to the next student, and do this with each student.
Now conduct the original exercise again, starting with the original student pair. Wait until one student pauses too long, buzz them out, add the next student, and so on.
Results
This exercise will help students follow their impulses and allow themselves to get into a stream of consciousness without judging it.
If your students can be more aware of the images and words in their consciousness, they can improve their creative confidence.
When your students are more creatively confident, they will develop stronger ideas and solutions to problems, and will engage in richer communication. This can be particularly useful if you have them making pitches later in the semester.
In the pitch process, students need to be very clear about every word they are saying, and need to be comfortable telling stories so they engage their audience. If they are more aware of the images and words they are trying to communicate, they should be better storytellers. This exercise will help them build that awareness!
Complete details to bring this exercise to life in your class, including all the instructions for you, are in the lesson plan below.
Get the “In My Mind’s Eye, Horatio” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “In My Mind’s Eye, Horatio” exercise to walk you, and your students through the process, step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.
Thank You to Jim Hart
A big thanks to Jim for creating and sharing this exercise! For more information about Jim and the amazing work he’s doing at Southern Methodist University, click here.
If you want to learn and practice exercises to better engage your students, and learn how to assess experiential learning, join us on May 10th. Jim, Julienne Shields, and our very own Justin Wilcox will use our unique digital conference format to guide you through experimenting with the tools and exercises they introduce to:
Enable your students to work on big ideas
Engage your students in entrepreneurial skills and mindset
Help your students with problem validation.
At this conference, you won’t learn by listening, you’ll learn by doing!
Steve Blank is one of the most influential people in modern entrepreneurship education, and he wants to answer your questions about teaching entrepreneurship.
