See the instructions below to learn how to use Google Docs and Slides to create your own digital worksheets that will engage students.
How to Create Digital Worksheets
In case you missed our previous post in this series, we talked about how combine your slides and webcam to recreate the effect below for live sessions.
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 final lesson, 60 Minute MVP, is ready!
Based on the extremely popular in-person version of this exercise, the online version of the 60 Minute MVP will have your students designing experiments to test demand just like they would if they weren’t under lockdown. They will:
Create a landing page
Add an explainer video and then
Start accepting pre-orders
The key to thriving in the face of high uncertainty and limited resources is efficient experimentation. With that in mind, this exercise will show your students how to quickly reduce the uncertainty of their business model by helping them launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to measure demand for their products/services.
Almost more important though…
This exercise is a ton of fun!
Students are excited because they’re doing something they didn’t know they had the skills to do, and it’s a great time for you because students are engaged in creating and sharing something with you and the rest of the class.
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 the 60 Minute MVP lesson plan, 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.
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.
How to Interview Customers on Lockdown: 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.
If you’re interested in using any of the exercises from the ExEC Online: Express Pack, please click here.
Due to the accelerated pace at which 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:
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!
If you’re wondering whether your students are paying attention during your online lectures…they’re not.
“I’m waking up and then falling asleep again in Zoom classes.” – Xavier University Student
To be clear, this isn’t your fault or your students’ fault. The way screen sharing works on video conference platforms (where students see your slides fullscreen but only a tiny thumbnail of your webcam) means it’s near impossible for anyone to pay attention during a slide-based online lecture.
You can recreate this effect for your live (and recorded) lectures.
But you can easily change that. Using free, open source software, you can do what news and TV shows have done for decades:
Show facts and faces side-by-side.
When students can see your face, they can read your non-verbal cues to see how passionate you are and how important a subject is. Combine that with the fact that human faces are naturally engaging, and you can start lecturing online in a way that’s not only more interesting to your students, but more fun for you – at least it has been for me :).
For everything you need to combine your slides and webcam, open the free instructions below.
How to Combine your Slides and Webcam
We will show you, step-by-step, how to combine your slides with your webcam to create engaging experiences for your students when listening to your lectures online.
Step 1: Create Test Slides
Create slides that have a green screen built into them, which means you will add an area (your green screen) that you will eventually replace with a video output (your webcam). To do this, in PowerPoint:
Click “Insert” on the top menu
Click the “Shapes” option
Select the square shape option.
Draw a square box over half of a blank slide. Then fill that box with a bright green color, using RGB color codes 0 for Red, 255 for Green, and 0 for Blue. You then want to send your green screen to the back by right-clicking, and selecting “Save to Back” from the menu that pops up. Finally, move the text box on the slide to the other half of the slide so it does not overlap with the green screen half.
Keep the PowerPoint window open and move it to the left half of your screen.
Now download OBS Studio, which is a free, open-source software that will enable the green screen effect. You’ll first want to set up your video output in OBS. To do this
Click on “File” in the top left corner
Click on “Settings” in that File menu
Click on “Video” in the menu on the left
In the top box labeled “Base (Canvas) Resolution”, make sure it is “1920 x 1080”
Now you want to add a new video source. In the “Sources” box at the bottom:
Click the + button
Click “Video capture device” from the menu that pops up
Name the device in the top line of the box that pops up (“Webcam” for instance)
Click “OK”
In the next pop-up box, select your webcam in the “Device” box
In the “Resolution/FPS Type” box, if your webcam allows output at different resolutions, you will want to select the same resolution you selected in the OBS video output (in this case, “1920 x 1080”)
Click “OK” and you should see your webcam output with a red box around it in the OBS window.
Next you want to add a specific window to your OBS video output as a source. In this case, that window will be your PowerPoint slides. To do this, in PowerPoint:
Click on the “Slide Show” menu at the top
Click on the “Set Up Slide Show” menu
Click on the “Browsed by an individual (window)” radio button
Click “OK”
Start your slideshow
Next you want to tell OBS to put the window showing your PowerPoint slide on top of the output from your webcam. To do this, in the Sources box of the OBS window:
Click the + button
Click “Window capture” from the drop-down menu
Name the output (maybe “Slides”)
Click “OK”
OBS will provide you with a set of windows you can potentially capture and lay over the webcam output. Click the drop-down menu labeled “Window” and select “PowerPoint Slideshow Presentation”
Click “OK”
You will now see the slideshow on top of your webcam output, with a red box around it. Drag the edges of the red box to make the slide show window the entire OBS output. You can then resize the original slide show (on the left half of your screen) to get rid of any black bars or elements around the edges you don’t want visible.
The next step is to get rid of the green screen. To do this:
In the OBS window, in the Sources box, right-click on the “Slides” source (or whatever you named your slides file)
Click “Filters” from the drop-down menu
Click the + on the bottom left of that window that opens
Click on “Color Key” from the drop-down menu
Name the Color Key in the box that pops up (for example, “Greenscreen”)
Click “OK”
You will see that the green part of the slideshow screen has been eliminated. If you see a slight green line between the two halves of the slides showing in the OBS window, you can slide the “Similarlity” slide to the right until that disappears. Click “Close” and you should see the right half of your slides visible and your webcam visible on the left half of the OBS window.
The next step is to move the webcam window. Click and drag the webcam output to the left until your face is positioned in the left half of the OBS window.
Now you can advance the PowerPoint slides by clicking on the Powerpoint window, and advancing the slides as you normally would. What you will see is in the OBS window, on the right side, the slides are advancing while the webcam output stays in place.
One advanced step is to an audio source in OBS. To do this:
Click the + button in the Sources box at the bottom.
Click the “Audio Input Capture” in the drop-down menu
This will be to capture your microphone, so name it accordingly (i.e., “Microphone”)
Click “OK”
In the pop-up window, select whatever microphone you normally use, then click “OK”
This isn’t necessary to capture the slide and webcam videos in OBS. However, you also have the capability to record videos in OBS. If you wanted to record any lectures/lessons in OBS, now you would have the capability to capture the screen and your audio – you would just click the “Start Recording” button in the Controls box in the OBS window.
Step 3: Send Video Output
You now have OBS set up to produce the output you want. The next step is to send that output to the places you want it sent. You have two basic options to make this happen.
Option 1: Virtual Camera
This option includes a piece of software that takes your OBS output and makes it look like it’s a normal webcam to any video conferencing software (Zoom, Webex, etc.) To enable this, all you need to do is select OBS as the video output (instead of your normal webcam) within your video conferencing software. This is the optimal solution, but it doesn’t always work seamlessly with every combination of operating system and video conferencing software. For instance, this works great for Windows and Zoom, but at the time of this post, Macs don’t support virtual cameras by default, so this isn’t the optimal solution for Macs.
Windows:
Install the VirtualCam plugin from here (click the “Go to download” link on the right side of the page).
When the install is finished, in OBS, click “Tools” at the top
Click “VirtualCam” from the drop-down menu
Click “Auto Start” in the box that pops up
Slide the “Buffered frames” slide all the way to the left so it is at 0
Click “Start”
Macs: You can follow the instructions in this video.
Note: There are some security implications involved with disabling System Integrity Protection required for this technique that are outside the scope of this article, so be sure you and/or your IT team are comfortable with those before proceeding.
This has now enabled your virtual camera to send the output to any service that wants to use your camera. To check whether this is working, open your video conferencing software (i.e., Zoom, Webex). Start a new meeting.
If your video conferencing window overlaps with your PowerPoint window, it will show up in your OBS output window. To prevent this, drag or shrink your video conferencing window so it does not overlap with your PowerPoint window, so in your OBS output window all you see is your webcam output (your face) and the non-greenscreen part of your slides.
We recommend you downsize the OBS window and enlarge the video conferencing window. But when doing this, make sure nothing overlaps with the PowerPoint window.
Click the appropriate buttons to start your video in your video conferencing window. The camera you want to select in your video conferencing software is the “OBS Camera”. You should see the OBS output is now showing in the video conferencing window.
Option 2: Screen Sharing OBS Preview Window
In the OBS output window, right-click in the grey section to the left of your face. Select “Windowed Projector Preview” from the drop-down menu. What this gives you is a window that previews the OBS output. You can adjust that window size to eliminate any sort of black bars or “blank” space around the edges.
In your video conferencing window, instead of using “OBS Camera” as your video output, you can select “Screen Share” (in Zoom) and select the “Windowed Projector Preview” screen. You will see a green box around the “Windowed Project Preview” box, which means that is what is being sent out via the video conferencing Screen Share.
Step 4: Add Some Flair to your Slides
Just as you do in class, you want your presentations to be dynamic and engaging for your students. You can do this by adding small elements to your presentation.
You might add your school colors to the presentation. Use larger, more interesting fonts. You can also experiment with moving the greenscreen portion around on your slides to shift where your webcam output shows up. Maybe you add that to the bottom corner of your slides, and you can look up at the text as it flies into your slides.
You now have the capability to create dynamic, engaging presentations for your students. Experiment with what OBS can do to bring your lectures and presentations to life!
If you haven’t already registered, remember to join us at the:
Last week we opened registration to a virtual conference dedicated to engaging students online. So far, 350+ entrepreneurship educators have registered. We hope you join us!
Let’s be honest. Teaching to a screen isn’t as fun as teaching in person. In person you can:
See if students are engaged
Have lively discussions
Connect with students
None of those are easy to do online, and because of it, teaching online can be more draining and less enjoyable.
Online Teaching Best Practices
Interested in learning how to teach online in a more engaging way? How about learning best practices in a live, “practice what we preach” environment with other entrepreneurship instructors from around the world?
Whether you’re new to online teaching and looking to improve your experience, or a pro willing to share your wisdom, please let us know if you’re interested in a virtual workshop dedicated to increasing engagement in online classes.
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!
Based on our Customer Interviewing Cards, this exercise has been adapted to teach students how to interview customers under the unique circumstances that COVID-19 has presented. Hopefully this lesson will only be applicable this term, but…
…it may be helpful in the Fall too!
This lesson is a fun way teach your students:
Where to find customers to interview during a quarantine
We’ve made this exercise as easy to integrate as possible.
Step 1
Have your students watch this video:
If you’re teaching a synchronous class, feel free to skip showing the video and simply teach the principles yourself.
Step 2
Students complete the Digital Customer Interviewing Cards spreadsheet where they learn what their “objectives” (i.e. goals) for conducting customer interviews are, as well as the best and worst questions to ask during those interviews.
Here’s a quick look at what the spreadsheet looks like:
Step 3
Students get access to a robust interview script they can use for both remote, and in-person, problem discovery videos.
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 the Customer Interview lesson plan, 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.
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 make 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 click here.
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:
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!
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, Yellowor Greenassessment:
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 ;).
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:
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]
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 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.
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
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 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:
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!
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 on Lockdown: 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:
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!
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.
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