Pitching the Process

December 18, 2021 Doan Winkel Comments 0 Comment

If you end your entrepreneurship class by having students pitch their companies, you may have seen:

A handful of pitches are great, but most are…meh.

We’ve had luck improving the overall quality of pitches for all students by updating what we want students to pitch.

Pitching the Process

When we shift away from a Shark Tank-style idea pitch to a process pitch, students walk through the iterations of their business model canvases throughout the course, telling the story of:

What assumptions they made along the way
How they tested those assumptions
What they changed in their business model as a result
What assumptions they want to test next

The goal of this Process Pitch is for students to show they have learned a process for finding successful business models. This approach:

Emphasizes skill development
Values testing business models “outside the building”
Engages all students in the process

In process pitches, students demonstrate:

They understand the business model validation process
They applied that process and evolved their business model based on experimentation
The entire process was led by their customers’ emotional needs/problems

The reason this approach is so engaging is because it focuses students on skill acquisition: business modeling, testing business model assumptions, customer interviews, etc. Because you assess students on their process, they are incentivized to test their business model and report accurate results. The emphasis is on the students’ journey, not their outcome; the goal is not success or failure but what they learned during the process.

Learn more about Pitching the Process here.

Process Pitch Winners

We recently held a Process Pitch competition for the thousands of students using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum, and students from Cal Poly won with their idea Spruce.ly. Out of many great entries, this amazing team stood out because they:

Demonstrated they learned skills (proven by the number of assumptions they invalidated)
Conducted customer interviews in a way that changed their business model
Ran several experiments including multiple ads campaigns, and user click-mapping on their MVP

Set Your Students Up For Success This Spring

Similar to how we redesigned the antiquated Shark Tank pitches, we created the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) as an engaging experience that accommodates in-person, online, and hybrid classes anywhere from 8 to 15 weeks long.

We weave a cohesive thread throughout the curriculum, with a combination of personally relevant exercises that cohesively teach a set of real-world entrepreneurial skills. Professors at more than 120 colleges and universities find their students highly engaged from the first exercise where students discover their passions to the last experience where they pitch their process.

We created course shells for all of the major learning management systems, so it takes less than 5 minutes to get your new course imported.

This spring, if you want to save time while engaging your students, use “the best entrepreneurship curriculum available” – structured, cohesive, interactive experiences that will engage your students in deep learning.

Engage Your Students This Spring

If you’re looking for classes that buzz with excitement and energy with games, competitions, and activities that engage students while teaching them real-world skills . . .

Preview ExEC and see if it can help you and your students!

What’s Next?

In an upcoming post, we will share information about our upcoming Winter Summit where we will share some exciting new exercises!

Subscribe here to be the first to grab a “seat” at the Summit.

1 Week Left to Adopt ExEC for Spring

November 22, 2021 Doan Winkel Comments 0 Comment

Spring is just around the corner!

Adopt ExEC today and let us set you up for success by delivering detailed lesson plans and a simplified grading process, and enabling you to deliver award-winning experiential exercises that transform your classroom into a hive of activity from day one.

Engage Your Students This Spring

We’ve been busy updating our curriculum to adapt to your learning environment:

We’ve got you covered whether you’ll be in-person, online synchronous or asynchronous, or some hybrid model.

ExEC is an engaging and structured curriculum that’s flexible enough for your Fall. To fully engage your students this Spring, request a full preview of ExEC today!

Preview ExEC Now

A Modern Alternative to Textbooks

November 8, 2021 Doan Winkel Comments 0 Comment

If there’s one thing we know about textbooks, it’s that . . .

Students dislike them.

Too out of date to be relevant, too boring to be worth reading, and too expensive to be worth buying, textbooks aren’t the best way to teach entrepreneurship skills (or engage students).

To engage a generation of students who have grown up in a digital media environment, what’s needed is a way to . . .

Meet Students Where They Are

Textbooks can’t compete with the dynamic, personalized spaces our students are used to.

Can you blame students for not being motivated to read a “riveting” chapter on entity formation when Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu all have queues of personally recommended shows vying for them to watch (not to mention curated profiles from Instagram, TikTok, and Tinder to check out)?

What if instead of having to use quizzes to compel our students to read bland, out-of-date textbooks, we produced content that was more personalized and engaging than the Netflix’s of the world?

This Spring, we’ll take a step in that direction. Starting in January, your students can have . . .

Personalized entrepreneurship experiences, online.

In a major update to the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC), students will be able to personally define and customize their entrepreneurial experiences.

A Student-Led Experience

With the new ExEC experience, students customize the content to suit their interests.

Unlike the “read-only” experience students get with textbooks, with the new ExEC, students literally edit the content based on their interests and business models.

The process starts with . . .

1. Identifying “Their” Customers

One of the most powerful ways to engage students is to make your course more about them than the subject you’re teaching. In other words . . .

What if instead of teaching an entrepreneurship class that may one day help your students pursue their passions, you taught a course on pursuing their passion – that happened to leverage entrepreneurship skills?

You’d cover the same content, but by prioritizing your students’ motivations, you automatically make the content more engaging.

That’s precisely what the new ExEC experience does.

Asking students questions about their interests and skills, and the people they’re most passionate about serving, students literally update their reading material to reflect the customers they’re most excited to serve:

At this early stage of the class, when the #1 goal is to engage students . . .

Who their customers are isn’t as important as how excited they are to serve them.

The students will find out for themselves whether their segment is a part of the business model validation process. Our job right now is to help the students find a set of customers they’re eager to go through the validation process with.

Soon, the students will start interviewing their customers, but in order to do that, they need to discover. . .

2. Where Are Their Customers?

You can’t interview a customer unless you can find them, so ExEC uses interactive prompts to guide students through a process that’s customized for their customer segment.

The results of which are a specific, actionable “channel” to use to find customers to interview:

In preparation for their interviews, students are ready to discover . . .

3. Good (and Bad) Customer Interviewing Questions

Using an interactive card game, students discover the right and wrong questions to ask during their customer interviews:

After completing a round of 5 interviews, students are ready to . . .

4. Analyze Their interviews

As students read through the theory of interview analysis, they plug in responses from their actual conversations with customers to discover how the theory is applied in the real world.

After having a thorough understanding of the problems their customers are trying to solve, students are ready for . . .

5. Solution Ideation

Using design thinking and creative problem-solving techniques, students ideate dozens of ways to resolve the problems they discovered during their customer interviews.

After which they’re ready for . . .

6. Financial Modeling

To understand how to build a profitable solution to the problem they’ve discovered, students use real-world data in ExEC’s Financial Projection Simulator; iterating their business model until they know it’s financially sustainable.

teaching finance in entrepreneurship

All of which contributes to their . . .

7. Business Model Canvas

Capturing all of the hypotheses they’ve validated (and the hypotheses still in need of validation) students edit the ExEC content to reflect their business model throughout the course.

Business Model Canvas

All of which culminates in their . . .

8. Process Pitch

Best of all, while they’ve been updating their content to reflect their experience . . .

Students have simultaneously been developing their end-of-the-term pitch deck!

Every step of their journey – every failed experiment, every validated hypothesis, every business model iteration – is automatically recorded and turned into a “Process Pitch Deck” students can use to present their understanding of the business model validation process and how they applied it.

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 repeatedly to solve problems of the people they want to serve.

See It In Action

Watch the video to see how even ExEC’s readings are interactive and experiential:

A Better Way to Teach Entrepreneurship

We all know . . .

Textbooks aren’t the best way to teach entrepreneurship.

Personalized, interactive content is what makes Netflix, Instagram, and every other platform our students use so engaging. The same principles work in educational content too.

Request a preview of ExEC today:

Engaging Students in Spring

October 25, 2021 Doan Winkel Comments 0 Comment

For those of us fortunate enough to be teaching again in person, it’s been wonderful to be back. Teaching via Zoom just isn’t the same.

That said, between the masks, and general uncertainty, and anxiety, it’s still more challenging to keep students engaged than it was pre-COVID. So as Spring approaches, we wanted to explore . . .

How do we engage our students even more this Spring?

Step 1: Get Relevant on Day #1

Think about the college classes you engaged with most as a student. Which classes had the most positive impact on your life? Which classes had the most positive impact on your career? Which classes do you remember most fondly?

Chances are, those classes all had something in common:

Those classes were personally relevant.

There was something about those classes that resonated with where you were in your life, on a personal level. Whether they tapped into your interests, piqued your curiosity, or aligned with your aspirations, those classes probably weren’t an introduction to a generic subject; those classes were about how that subject impacted you and your future.

Your students are looking for the same thing.

Students want to engage with subjects that are relevant to their lives right now. That’s why in every class there are a few students who automatically engage (i.e., those that see themselves as entrepreneurs) and those that have a harder time engaging (i.e., those that don’t).

And that’s why entrepreneurship can be a hard class to teach. While you and I know entrepreneurship skills will be relevant throughout their career, it’s hard for students to see how entrepreneurship will be relevant today.

That’s why in the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC), we use exercises like “Pilot your Purpose” to help students discover their passions, and “Fears and Curiosities” where they use those passions to design what they’d like to learn.

The first page of the “Pilot Your Purpose” exercise for ExEC students.

Leveraging these exercises in the first week of class, and strategically revisiting them throughout the course, make entrepreneurship skills personally relevant to students, regardless of their desire to “become an entrepreneur.”

Whether you use a curriculum like ExEC, or your own combination of resources, in order for your class to be as engaging as your most memorable classes, you’ll want your students to see how entrepreneurship is personally relevant to them from day one.

Step 2: Get Organized

If you’ve ever tried to increase engagement by incorporating exercises from disparate sources (e.g. journals, conferences, etc.)., you know that’s not the answer.

Activities alone don’t make a class engaging.

Individual exercises can be interesting, but without a cohesive thread linking them together, students check out because it’s not clear how what they’re learning can improve their lives.

Structuring your course from the beginning with a combination of:

Personally relevant exercises
That cohesively teach a set of
Real-world entrepreneurial skills

Has been the formula we’ve found that keeps students engaged at 120+ colleges and universities:

LMS Integration

Since the pandemic began, virtually every element of your course needs to be reflected in your Learning Management System (LMS) so that students know what’s due when, regardless of how they attend class.

To assist our ExEC instructors, we’ve created course shells for all of the major LMSs so it takes less than 5 minutes to get a new course imported.

Flexible Schedules

And despite our best efforts, scheduling issues inevitably show up. Whether due to holidays, weather events, or COVID outbreaks, you need to make sure your schedule can withstand unexpected disruptions.

For ExEC instructors, we produce a wide range of schedules to accomodate in-person, online, and hybrid classes anywhere from 8 to 15 weeks long:

All of which can be customized to include a combination of award-winning lessons and your own.

not every classsince the pandemic began, virtually every element of your course needs to be reflected in your Learning Management System (LMS).

Fair and Transparent Grading

All that said, no amount of engaging activities and structure will make a difference if students feel like they aren’t be graded fairly.

To that end, structured rubrics go a long way toward making assessment transparent.

For ExEC courses, we produce rubrics for each assignment which makes grading more objective – something both students an instructors appreciate.

Step 3: Have Fun

Teaching should be enjoyable – for you and your students. In fact . . .

The more fun you have, the more fun your students will have.

For ExEC classes, we try to create environments that buzzes with excitement and energy with games, competitions, and activities that engage students while teaching them real-world skills.

Engage Your Students This Spring

If you haven’t already . . .

Preview ExEC and see if it can help you and your students!

Even if ExEC isn’t a fit for you, we hope you’re able to:

Make your class relevant from day #1
Get organized
Have fun

This combination should help your students get, and stay engaged, throughout your course.

What’s Next?

In an upcoming post, we will share information about our upcoming Winter Summit where we will share some exciting new exercises!

Subscribe here to be the first to grab a “seat” at the Summit.

Teach the Business Model Canvas: Part 3 – Test

October 17, 2021 Doan Winkel Comments 0 Comment

Dr. Alex Osterwalder, one of the creators of the Business Model Canvas (BMC), uses a 3-step process to teach it to students. This article outlines his third step:

How to test a business model canvas.

In the first step of his process, Alex introduces students to the different components of the BMC by having them match the business model hypotheses to the appropriate boxes of the canvas. In the second step, Alex helps students learn to write their hypotheses by asking students to complete partially finished BMCs.

In this third step, Alex helps students learn how to use the Business Model Canvas as a tool to prioritize their business models’ riskiest assumptions so they can design tests to validate them.

Prioritization Exercise

It’s critical to teach this prioritization step because it’s one of the major benefits of teaching the BMC over traditional business plans. Once entrepreneurs have a prioritized list of their riskiest assumptions, they can design experiments to test each of those assumptions in order of their prioritized risk.

To introduce prioritization, Alex presents an example from one of Steve Blank‘s classes that you’re welcome to use as well. Steve’s students were working on a company called Ceres, where they wanted to fly drones over farmland to capture images and generate data to help farmers fight drought, disease, and pests.

To help your students visualize what that means in practical terms, you can show them this video:

Step 1: Technical Hypotheses

Show your students the following BMC for Ceres and ask them to brainstorm what technological challenges have to be addressed for the business model to work.

Your students might share similar thoughts as Steve’s students had, such as:

Demonstrate they can build drones
Develop software to extract data from images the drones collect
Present data to farmers in a way they could use it

As with the previous exercises in this series, we recommend using the Think. Pair. Share. technique where students first reflect on the question individually, then share their thoughts with a partner, and finally, you facilitate a discussion with the entire class. This approach enables a lot more interaction and discussion than immediately starting with a class-wide discussion.

Step 2: Business Hypotheses

Next up, have your students brainstorm the non-technical challenges Ceres will have to tackle for their business model to be successful.

Your students may come up with challenges like:

Farmers want data to treat their fields
Farmers want to forecast their production
Farmers have a budget for our value proposition
Farmers are willing to pay for data
Farmers struggle with diseases and drought
Local water utilities and fertilizer/pesticide producers are interested in partnering

Step 3: Prioritizing Hypotheses

Now ask “which of these hypotheses should Ceres test first?” In other words, when there are so many assumptions about a business model, how do you prioritize which ones to test first?

Ask your students which 3 of the 9 hypotheses listed above would they test first. This is another great opportunity to utilize the Think. Pair. Share. technique.

After sharing, tell students that when we talk about the riskiest hypothesis of a business model, we say…

The riskiest assumption of a business model is the one that is most likely to kill the business.

With that in mind, it might make sense that the Ceres students chose the following as their riskiest assumptions:

Demonstrate they can build drones
Develop software to extract data from images the drones collect
Present data to farmers in a way they could use it

You could imagine the Ceres students saying, “Without drones and the data they collect, we have no business!” What they and most entrepreneurs don’t realize is, as Alex puts it, “Desirability” hypotheses are almost universally riskier than “Feasibility” hypotheses.

It turns out that “Feasibility” hypotheses (i.e., “Can we build it?”) are nowhere near as difficult to validate as “Desirability” hypotheses. That’s because…

A problem without a solution is a matter of time. A solution without a problem is a waste of time.

Put another way, if you find out someone has a problem, there are a myriad of ways you can try and solve that problem. But, if you have a solution to a problem, but no one actually has or cares about solving that problem, the solution is useless and all the time spent building it was wasted.

So Ceres’ riskiest assumption isn’t that they can build a drone; their riskiest assumption is that farmers have problems that can be solved with drones.

Their actual riskiest assumptions all fall under the “Desirability” category:

Farmers struggle with diseases and drought
Farmers are willing to pay for data
Local water utilities and fertilizer/pesticide producers are interested in partnering

Once the desirability and viability hypotheses have been validated, the riskiest assumptions fall within the feasibility category.

To demonstrate this point, tell your students about the…

Step 4: Ceres Case Study Update

What happened, in reality, is that Ceres students started interviewing farmers, and farmers asked:

Why would you build drones to take pictures when we already fly planes over our fields to spray for fertilizers and pesticides?

Farmers told students they could just attach a camera to the planes that are already flying over the fields to capture images. If students had built their drones first and talked to customers second, they would have invested millions of dollars building unnecessary technology.

Instead, because the Ceres team validated their desirability hypotheses before their feasibility hypotheses, they were able to simplify their business model and lower costs for themselves and their customers by eliminating the need for developing drones entirely.

As a result, the Ceres team was able to scale its business model to secure significant funding and recognition for its innovativeness.

The lesson for your students:

Always test desirability before feasibility.

Step 5: Homework

At this point, students have experience with the Business Model Canvas that they’re ready to apply what they’ve learned.

For homework, assign students to fill in the BMC for a venture they’d like to validate, as well as identify the 3 riskiest hypotheses of their business model.

The Business Model Canvas and variations of it (e.g. Lean Canvas, Mission Model Canvas, etc.) are some of the most popular and ubiquitous tools in use. Dr. Alex Osterwalder’s use of matching, fill-in-the-blank, and prioritization exercises is intentional, and helps educators avoid some of the common pitfalls when teaching the BMC, namely:

disengaging learners with lectured-based instruction,
overwhelming learners with insufficient structure, and
not adequately addressing how to use the BMC as a hypothesis prioritization and validation tool

In this 3-article series, we shared the steps Alex uses to teach this important tool for entrepreneurship educators.

In the first step, Alex introduces students to the different components of the BMC by having them match the business model hypotheses to the appropriate boxes of the canvas.
In the second step, Alex helps students learn to write their hypotheses by asking students to complete partially finished BMCs.
In this third step, Alex helps students learn how to use the BMC to prioritize the riskiest assumptions so they can design tests to validate them.

Want More from Dr. Osterwalder?

If you like this exercise, Alex also has two new books that are great resources for the classroom:

Find more about Alex’s work at Strategyzer.com.

Watch Alex Teach

If you’d like to see Alex teach the Business Model Canvas himself, just enter your email below to watch his full workshop on Teaching the BMC:

Get the Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 3 Lesson Plan

We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 3” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.

It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers so share it with another instructor you know.

What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share more exercises to engage your students and more tips and tricks to improve your evaluations.

Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.

Missed Our Recent Articles?

Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:

Prototyping and Pitching. Storytelling is an important entrepreneurship skill. In this experiential exercise, students learn they must inspire others to take action.
Financial Modeling Showdown. If your students get overwhelmed by financial modeling, try this exercise that combines a competitive game with real-world financial modeling tools.
Improve Student Evaluations and Outcomes. Journaling can transform your students’ experience in your classroom. And can be a great way to get quality feedback on whether you’re an effective educator.
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!

Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 2 – Apply

October 10, 2021 Doan Winkel Comments 1 comment

Dr. Alex Osterwalder, one of the creators of the Business Model Canvas (BMC) uses a 3-step process to teach it to students. The article outlines his second step:

Fill-in-the-blank exercises to help students develop their own hypotheses.

In the first step of his process, Alex introduces students to the different components of the BMC by having them match the business model hypotheses to the appropriate boxes of the canvas. In this second step, Alex helps students learn to write their hypotheses by asking students to complete partially finished BMCs.

Fill-in-the-Blank BMCs

In this exercise, you’ll give students some of the business model components for well-known companies and ask them to fill in the rest.

Alex uses fill-in-the-blank exercises intentionally. By providing students with some components of the BMC and asking them to write in the rest, students are able to start practicing using the BMC without the risk of them getting overwhelmed.

He repeats this process several times for different companies, each time providing students fewer components filled in until ultimately, students are completing the canvas entirely on their own.

Like in the first exercise, we recommend using a Think. Pair. Share. model with this lesson to make this activity more interactive and engaging. Details on how to complete all of the above are below.

Step 1: Think

Show students this Dollar Shave Club commercial:

Next, you’ll ask your students to fill in a BMC for the Dollar Shave Club, but you’ll want to give them a couple of hints first. Tell your students that Dollar Shave Club:

Started selling online, with no physical stores
They acquired customers through viral videos
And that these two approaches were novel at the time and instrumental to their success

Give your students this partially filled out BMC for Dollar Shave Club’s business model (link to the worksheets are in the lesson plan below). Give students a few minutes to individually fill in their assumptions for the following boxes:

Channel
Revenue Streams

Step 2: Pair

Next, ask students to pair up (or create breakout rooms for virtual students), and compare their answers. If there’s anything they disagree on, ask them to try to discuss and come to a consensus.

Note: this is an important part of the Think. Pair. Share. process. Talking with a peer helps them organize their thoughts better and practice vocalizing them. If your students are reluctant to speak in class, pairing students up like this before asking for a class-wide discussion can help inspire more interaction.

Step 3: Share

Finally, reconvene the class and ask students to share the assumptions they filled in. Progress around the room asking for students’ assumptions for the Channel, Revenue Streams boxes, and discuss any discrepancies or disagreements.

Start filling in the boxes:

The first Channel you gave them – online store. The second Channel is viral videos (Youtube).
The Revenue Stream is a customized subscription.

Step 4: Second Think-Pair-Share

This is a good opportunity to point out to students that they cannot utilize the channel that provided lots of visibility (YouTube) without incurring significant costs. In the case of Dollar Shave Club, replacing traditional marketing with viral videos requires costly activities & resources. Give students a few minutes to individually fill in their assumptions for the following boxes:

Cost Structure
Key Activities
Key Resources
Key Partners

Next, ask students to pair up and compare their answers. If there’s anything they disagree on, ask them to try to discuss and come to a consensus. Finally, reconvene the class and ask students to share the assumptions they filled in. Progress around the room asking for students’ assumptions for the Key Activities, Key Resources, and Cost Structure boxes, and discuss any discrepancies or disagreements.

Start filling in the boxes:

Key Activities are viral videos.
Key Resources are an e-commerce store and a brand.
Costs are for viral videos and marketing.
Key Partners are manufacturers and e-commerce platform providers.

Using viral videos is Dollar Shave Club’s way to keep the online store flowing with customers.

Fill-in-the-Blank Exercise: B2B

For a B2B business model canvas, we suggest using Salesforce. Provide students the following context:

Salesforce was founded with the goal of “making enterprise software as easy to use as a website like amazon.com.” They pioneered the software-as-a-service (Saas) model for customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and was visionary in predicting the potential of online software.

Step 5: Revenue & Relationships

Repeat the Think. Pair. Share. process from above, this time with a partially-completed BMC worksheet (links to worksheets are in the lesson plan below) asking students to fill in the following boxes for Salesforce:

Revenue Streams
Customer Relationship

Step 6: Complete the Canvas

Repeating the same process as before, ask students to complete the rest of Salesforce’s BMC:

Step 7: Design Your Own Canvas

By this point, your students will have completed several BMCs and they’ll be ready to start creating their own. Using the included BMC template in the worksheets (linked in the lesson plan), ask your students to individually start designing the business model for the company they want to create.

Step 8: Get Feedback

After filling in their canvas, ask students to share their business model’s design with one other student in the class and see if that person has any feedback (i.e., did the designer use each of the boxes appropriately?). Then switch roles so both students get a chance to present and get feedback.

Next Exercise: Prioritization

The BMC is great for helping students develop their business model hypotheses, but that’s only half the value of the tool. The other half is…

Using the Business Model Canvas to test your hypotheses.

In our next article, we will outline a lesson plan for Alex uses to demonstrate how the BMC helps entrepreneurs prioritize their business models’ riskiest assumptions.

It’s critical to teach this step because it’s one of the major benefits of teaching the BMC over traditional business plans. Once entrepreneurs have a prioritized list of riskiest assumptions, they can design experiments to test each of those assumptions and validate their business model!