Customer interviews make students anxious because they fear approaching strangers.
It’s our job to build their customer interviewing muscle.
Like the Make Entrepreneurship Relevant Slides, you can use these slides to get your students excited about interviewing customers. If you’d like to lower student anxiety around customer interviews, try this series of experiences:
CRAWL: Learn What To Ask
In your first class on customer interviews, consider using a lesson like the Customer Interviewing Cards to help your students learn:
What questions they should ask
What questions they shouldn’t ask
And, most importantly, why
Once your students have a good sense of what to ask during an interview, they’re ready to . . .
WALK: Interview Classmates
Students should get comfortable interviewing in a low-stakes environment, so have them start by interviewing 2 – 3 of their classmates.
It’s common for students to feel awkward conducting their first interviews. Let them know the awkwardness is normal and that’s why you’re giving them the opportunity to practice. Reassure your students that the more interviews they do, the more comfortable they’ll feel.
Bonus: Having students interview each other means each student gets interviewed as well.
When students get interviewed, they experience how validating it is to have someone listen to their problems.
When students realize that it feels good to be interviewed, they discover they won’t be bothering their interviewees. That insight alone can reduce their anxiety.
Note: The goal of classmate interviews is just to practice interviewing – they shouldn’t be used for real business model validation. Have your students start their classmate interviews off with, “What’s the biggest challenge you have as a student?” and then let the interview flow from there.
Click below to learn how your students can RUN and FLY with their customer interviews!
RUN: Interview Family and Friends
After interviewing a couple of classmates, students are ready to try interviewing friends and family members. This step gives students a safe way to practice interviewing people who, like their customers, will have no idea what a customer interview is.
As homework, ask your students to interview 3 friends or family members for at least 30 minutes each. Their goal is to learn as much as they can about the problems their interviewees have encountered in the last week (i.e., “What have been the biggest challenges that have come up for you over the last week?”).
As with the classmate interviews, the friends and family interviews shouldn’t be related to the product/service the students ultimately want to launch. These are just practice interviews in preparation for . . .
FLY: Interview Customers
Your students are now ready for real customer interviews!
You’ll want to make your students know the right customers to ask for interviews, and how to ask for those interviews, but at this point, your students will have much less anxiety about interviewing customers.
Since we started implementing this progression with our students, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in our students’ interviewing confidence and the quality of their interviews:
“At the beginning, I was really nervous about interviewing but after getting feedback from my friends and family it’s, surprisingly, become my favorite part of the class!”
– ExEC Student
If you’d like any more help teaching customer interviews, including:
In upcoming posts, we will share more slides, videos, and exercises to engage your students.
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:
Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
“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 Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviewing, and the right questions to ask.
Journaling: How to Improve Student Outcomes & Evaluations
There’s a simple tool you can use to potentially improve your student evaluations while simultaneously…
Improving student outcomes.
Jay Markiewicz, Executive Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Virginia Commonwealth University, shared the tool he’s using to do just that:
Reflective student journaling.
Jay uses journaling not only to help students process the experiences he leads them through, he uses it to model customer interviewing and understand his effectiveness as an instructor, “I’m teaching entrepreneurship, so I might as well act like one. So I do customer interviews through journaling.”
Introducing Journaling
Jay requires students to purchase a journal of their choosing. He requires the journal to be paper-based – no electronic versions on a phone, iPad, computer, etc. Jay urges students to find a journal they like, that speaks to them because they need to have a relationship with it.
On the 1st or 2nd day of class, Jay spends 15 minutes explaining the concept of journaling and talking about why journaling (reflective thinking & learning) is important. He recommends sharing the following:
Students will journal 3 times each week outside of class for 15 minutes each time.
Students will journal during class time with 2-3 minutes at the beginning of class, and if time allows also a couple minutes at the end of class.
Jay will never, ever look at a journal; whatever the students write in it is a private relationship between them and their journal.
Jay will never ask students what is in their journals. Instead, he will ask students to volunteer what they are journaling about.
When journaling, if instead of class materials, students want to journal about something that’s really on their mind (an argument with a friend, an exam they performed poorly on, something happening in the world, etc.) they should feel free to journal about that.
Integrating Journaling into Class
Jay starts each class session by asking one or two students to share something that happened over the weekend. This quick minute allows students to feel ownership over the classroom.
Jay then integrates journaling into the class with a 2 or 3-minute reflection session. During this time, Jay asks questions that are good for students to process the information they’ve learned recently (and are good customer interviewing questions for him).
At the beginning of his course, Jay will often ask students to journal their answers to a question like:
“In your own words, what are some key points you learned in last class / last week.” It is critical to stress the “in your own words” part of that prompt. What you don’t want students to do is to grab their notes and regurgitate what you told them in previous classes. Jay recommends using this question early in the semester to get students feeling comfortable with journaling.
After a month of classes, Jay recommends asking more reflective questions about applied learning, such as:
“How has [specific content] showed up for you outside the classroom?” This allows Jay to understand how students are thinking about the content when outside the class. He hears things from students like “I noticed this commercial the other day, and noticed the framework of how they created the commercial and told the story” or “I read this article about this startup and was curious what kind of experiments they were running.”
Hearing this feedback shows Jay the knowledge is sinking in for students because they are applying it beyond the classroom.
Another great question to ask is “What is an insight you have about recent classes that you don’t think anyone else in the room has thought of.” Instead of Jay revisiting key insights or past content, students illustrate for each other how they’re understanding the content.
This peer sharing is a way for students to set aspirations for one another as they aspire to think of novel applications of the class concepts.
Another great question to ask is “How have you acted differently recently because of what we are learning in this class?” This question gets Jay’s students thinking about turning the content from the class into action during their daily life.
After the quick journaling session, Jay debriefs by asking “Who wants to tell me what they journaled about?” Ask for volunteers instead of calling on students, and guide the ensuing discussion around how students can apply what they are learning.
Journaling on Quizzes
Another way Jay uses journaling is as part of an exam, or you could use it as a stand-alone pop quiz. Jay asks students “what are four things you’ve learned in this class about anything” on an exam, and urges students “please raise the bar of your insights. In other words, what have been four insights you have had. Don’t answer this question with some basic facts like ‘I learned the steps of design thinking’.”
All students get full credit on that particular question. Jay told us:
This is a great way to understand what is resonating with my students and what are those impactful “SQUIRREL!” moments (i.e. tangents) that are happening that I want to repeat in subsequent semesters.
What Happens When Students Resist?
Jay has not had any verbal pushback from his students on journaling. In fact, his student feedback is that they find it a refreshing way to begin each class.
Some students will be resistant to journaling. Jay reported that sometimes on a “what are 4 things you learned” type question, he gets some version of “I can’t believe it, but the journaling has been really valuable.”
Journaling might be jarring to a student because it can be a very different classroom experience for them. Students are not just sitting there passively taking notes and texting friends, but are being invited to engage, participate, and be present in the experience.
Adapting Your Course Based On Journaling Learning
Jay uses the information he hears from students sharing their journaling to make real-time adjustments during the semester. If critical content isn’t sinking in with students, Jay takes the time to revisit it, but with a new spin to avoid sharing the same information, with the same examples.
If a student shares something after journaling that is a misunderstanding of critical material, that is a great outcome, because you can have a conversation right on the spot. Jay recommends inviting other students to respond if they have the same misunderstanding, and for those who do not, asking them to share their differing opinion so that the students are teaching one another and he’s their facilitator.
Your job is to guide the conversation as a peer-peer conversation so they are teaching each other and learning together. As Jay shared:
“Yes it takes class time, yes it can disrupt the timing of the day, but it is valuable to validate what students are learning and to correct misunderstandings.”
On the other end of the feedback spectrum, Jay reported that sometimes students will say something in journaling report-out that is absolutely brilliant. When that happens, Jay will grab the quote from the student and, when applicable, add it to his slides. Jay pulls up the actual slide and gets the student’s permission to type the quote in live, so students see it, and says to the student “Thank you for allowing me to use that, you are now part of this course going forward!” In that way, again…
Jay’s students (i.e. customers) shape his course.
Finally, Jay recommends keeping a document titled “Changes to make next semester.” Based on journaling & exam journaling questions, he adds notes to this document so when he is planning his course next semester, he can tweak where there are gaps in understanding.
The Results
The benefits of journaling have become clear to Jay, with students frequently writing in their course evaluations notes like:
“I would always get excited when we were asked to pull out our journals.”
“My favorite resource required was that I needed a journal for this class.”
“[I value] the act of journaling…it gives us the opportunity to reflect and share our personal thoughts in a private way that we only have to share about if we feel comfortable.”
“I really appreciated how you opened the course so that we all were the teachers and leaders in the course.”
In addition, Jay’s course evaluations have been 12% above norms due at least in part to his use of journaling.
Should you Try Journaling?
That depends on your goals. If student feedback isn’t valued by your institution or you don’t have the bandwidth to iterate your course, journaling won’t have much impact.
If, however, you:
Practice what you preach and always want to improve your course
Want to model customer-centric behavior for your students
Want to improve your student evaluations
Journaling is a simple, low-cost way to accomplish the above that can be applied in virtually any class.
If you give it a shot, please let us, and Jay, know!
What’s Next?
In an upcoming post, we will share new lesson plans from our Summer Summit!
Subscribe here to be the first to get these kind of resources in your inbox.
The article below represents our top exercises from 2021. For our 2022 list, check out this article.
“Your posts help me keep my students engaged – they and I thank you!” – ExEC Curriculum Professor
Based on the popularity of our 2018 Top 5 Lesson Plans article, we’ve updated our list based on feedback from our fast-growing community of now 4,600-strong entrepreneurship instructors.
The following are all lesson plans we’ve designed to transform your students’ experience as they learn how to generate ideas, interview customers, prototype and validate solutions.
5. Idea Generation vs. Problem Generation
Many of our students believe an idea is the heart of entrepreneurship. In this lesson, we shatter that assumption and replace it with an appropriate focus on customer problems.
We want your students to develop ideas that are more feasible, impactful, and creative.
This is the toughest challenges entrepreneurship professors face. Student ideas tend to be a repetition of low-impact or infeasible mediocrity. You want more from them. We can help! We focus your students on problems in this lesson because the best business ideas come from problems.
After this lesson, your students’ ideas will be:
More feasible because they’re focusing on serving people they care about.
More impactful because they’re paying more attention to problems than they are products.
More creative because they’ll use those problems as inspiration.
In this exercise, shared with us by Rebeca Hwang from Stanford University, students create a business plan about themselves. Students approach themselves as a company and apply the tools they learned during their entrepreneurship course to understand how they add value to the world.
Students answer questions about their future vision and about their present plans and passions. One of our professor’s favorite components of this exercise is that students choose who grades their personal business plan (and that our colleagues at Stanford provide a very robust rubric)!
Through this exercise, students:
Learn to see themselves as a company,
Learn they must continuously invest in and develop a plan for their future,
Embrace the tools and methodologies they learned in the course because they are applying them to their future,
Understand learning is meaningful when applied to a personal context
We consistently hear from faculty that teaching customer interviewing is their biggest challenge. In this lesson plan students use a combination of ExEC Customer Interviewing Playing Cards, with an online collaborative quiz game (Kahoot), to learn:
What their problem interviewing goals should be and should not be
What questions they should and should not ask
Students then get an interview script template they can use as the basis for their problem discovery interviews.
This exercise teaches your students:
What objectives they should and should not attempt to accomplish during a problem discovery interview and why,
What questions they should and shouldn’t ask during a customer discovery interview and why,
What a comprehensive interview script book looks like
One of our most popular lesson plans is the 60 Minute MVP. During this class, students launch an MVP website, with an animated video and a way to take pre-orders, in an hour with no prior coding experience. One of our professors told us after running this exercise:
“One student described it as like a Navy Seal mental training exercise. Not sure it was that intense, but they were amazed and proud that they got it done.”
Your students will love this class period; they progress from the anxiety of the challenge confronting them (build a website in 60 minutes) to the elation of their journey (launching a website they built in 60 minutes). This exercise creates tremendous energy in your classroom. Students create something real.
On the lesson plan page you can view an example video students created in about 20 minutes, built around actual customer problem interviews:
You can also view a great example of a website built in just 60 minutes:
Upscale dining at its finest!
Some critical learnings for your students are the true meaning of Minimum Viable Product (MVP), that it’s easier to launch a product than they thought, and that the easiest thing about building a business is launching that product.
During our years of research on what topics entrepreneurship professors struggle to teach, we heard “customer interviewing” over and over again. Our ExEC curriculum includes a robust method of customer interviewing, but customer observation is another great way to gather customer information. So we developed our Teaching Customer Observations lesson plan to help students learn the value of seeing how their customers experience problems, as opposed to imagining their customers’ problems.
In addition to our community thinking this is a powerful experience in the classroom, this exercise also won first place in the Excellence in Entrepreneurial Exercises Awards at the USASBE 2019 Annual Conference!
This exercise positions your students to observe customers in their natural settings. This allows them to discover new business opportunities and increase their empathy and behavioral analysis skills.
Our goal with this exercise is to teach students to have an empathy picture/analysis that frames the problem they are trying to solve before they jump to a solution. Having this clear picture will allow them to come up with better creative solutions.
During this two-class exercise, your students will experience customer empathy and how to plan and translate an observation experience into ideas for products and services. This will provide the following benefits:
Introduce students to a powerful tool to gather information on customer experience in real-life situations. This allows students to avoid predicting customer behavior by actually observing it.
Students practice how to listen with their eyes in order to understand what people value and care about, & what they don’t.
Provide a common reference experience for expanding on topics later in the course.
If you are looking for a fully structured, experiential entrepreneurship curriculum, with a semester’s worth of lesson plans that students love, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Here is part 2 of our interview with entrepreneurship innovator and educator Steve Blank, where he shares his thoughts on what is essential for an entrepreneurship class and an entrepreneurship curriculum. If you missed part 1, you can catch up here.
Steve Blank is an icon in entrepreneurship education. He is known for developing the customer development method that launched the Lean Startup movement. A serial entrepreneur turned educator, Steve continues to elevate the field of entrepreneurship and greatly influences how we teach entrepreneurship principals.
Steve Blank on What is Essential to Teach in an Entrepreneurship Class
Increasing numbers of universities require students to take entrepreneurship courses. While Steve doesn’t believe these courses should be mandatory, he had very clear ideas on what the goal should be for entrepreneurship courses.
The truth is we will have students in our classes that are not interested in becoming entrepreneurs. Whether it’s because they’re taking the class because it’s required or whether they have a true interest in becoming an entrepreneur, we have a commitment to helping our students actualize their potential.
“How do we make a well-rounded individual in the 21st century?”
Steve shared that, at the core, entrepreneurship courses, build skills in tenacity, resilience, and agility in hypothesis testing. These skills are valid for all students, whether they want to be an entrepreneur or not. And it is his belief that these skills should be the foundation of a liberal arts education in the 21st century.
Particularly since the evolution of society and technology have created a shorter lifespan for most companies. By building up these skills, students will be able to access them as they go about building their careers. In addition, entrepreneurship classes will help identify future entrepreneurs.
However, these skills shouldn’t be limited to college learning. Steve envisions these methods being taught as part of a K-12 curriculum as well. Similar to the Korda Institute for Teaching, entrepreneurship can be integrated into classroom learning to bolster student skills, knowledge, and community impact. By designing educational experiences that utilize entrepreneurship principles, students can start learning early to solve problems that impact or involve their community.
Steve Blank’s 4 Essential Courses for Entrepreneurship Curriculum
We liked the idea of narrowing the focus of an entrepreneurship curriculum, but we also asked Steve if there were courses he deemed essential when designing a curriculum. Here are the four core entrepreneurial classes or concepts Steve believes should be included:
Creativity: This course includes customer discovery and helps students isolate the problems they want to solve.
Lean Launchpad Lite: This is a stripped-down version of Lean Launchpad which Steve believes can sometimes be bogged down with jargon. This class includes the framework and practical questions every entrepreneur needs to ask without a large focus on terminology.
Core Skills (or as Steve likes to put it “Fucking with your head”): This is a skill-building class focused on improving student’s resilience, tenacity, and agility. Lesson plans focus on hypothesis testing and fact-checking. In this class, students become more comfortable with chaos, uncertainty, and even failure.
Capstone: The capstone centers around the specific domain of expertise. For each university, it will vary with the region and the focus of the institution.
Designing Entrepreneurship Curriculum for the Students You Want to Attract
One of the questions we’re often asked is how to build a comprehensive curriculum. When put to Steve, he recommends keeping students top of mind when designing an entrepreneurship curriculum.
If I was in a university the first question I would ask for an educator is, am I building a curriculum for the students I have, or am I building a curriculum for the students I want to attract?
He shared the example of talking with some educators in Lincoln, Nebraska who work with farmers. The teachers were interested in putting together a class for farmers. The opportunity this presented for the university, in Steve’s words, “is they could become the Lean expert for farm entrepreneurship rather than replicating the other 7,000 versions of a general Lean Startup curriculum”. The question Steve encourages institutions and entrepreneurship professors to ask when designing curriculum are:
Is there a domain of expertise we can or should focus on?
Can we create a vertical version of Lean Startup for this area?
Teaching Minimum Viable Product
On the topic of buzzwords and jargon found in Lean Start-up, the idea of an MVP is one of the most often misunderstood concepts taught in entrepreneurship. Particularly, it can be difficult to teach.
One of the mistakes Steve discussed regarding the idea of a Minimum Viable Product or (MVP) is that businesses may understand finding a product to fit a certain market, but they stop there. Students and entrepreneurs alike need to understand that all components of the business model need to be tested and some of them need to be re-tested.
Therefore, when teaching MVP to students, finding customers who want particular features of a product or want the product is just Step 1 of a robust class. For example, we could also design a class around MVP’s for pricing. Students can test whether a product could sell for $20,000 rather than $9.99.
From customer discovery to learning how to pivot, an effective MVP course teaches students to run experiments across all components of commercialization.
Key Takeaway
Finishing out our discussion, Steve expressed the key takeaway he wants educators and universities alike to realize is that one-size-fits-all does not fit all for an entrepreneurship class. Whether we’re teaching tech, corporate, or social entrepreneurship, he encourages us to take our expertise and adjust our curriculums to get the right impedance match for the right students. In other words, treat our students like customers.
Our classes are our own little start-up.
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Whether you’re teaching online, face-to-face, or a hybrid of the two, we built our Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) to provide award-winning engagement and excitement for your students
We’ve taken the guesswork out of creating an engaging approach that works both online or in-person. ExEC has a comprehensive entrepreneurship syllabus template complete with 15 weeks of award-winning lesson plans that can be easily adapted to your needs.
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:
“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 Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviews, and the right questions to ask.
Online Entrepreneurship Syllabus. This online entrepreneurship syllabus is an innovative online experience that is asynchronous with multiple touchpoints, skills-based, and experiential.
Want to improve how you teach entrepreneurship? Steve has some ideas.
Before we get there though, with the fires raging along the West Coast of the US, one of which is stunningly close to Steve’s home, we wanted to send him, his family, and everyone affected by the fires, our best wishes.
Steve and I sat down, pre-pandemic, for an in-depth discussion on the state of entrepreneurship education and ways to improve it going forward.
Below I’ve written up a summary of half of our conversation: thoughts on how to teach entrepreneurship.
In an upcoming part two, I’ll summarize some of Steve’s ideas on creating a comprehensive entrepreneurship curriculum, including:
The skills professors should teach their students, and
Four courses Steve thinks are core to a robust entrepreneurship program
First, for anyone unfamiliar: Who is Steve Blank?
Forefather of Lean Startup
Entrepreneur, author, professor, an originator of evidence-based entrepreneurship, Steve Blank has developed or made famous some of the most recognizable approaches to entrepreneurship including:
In addition, Steve has reimagined the way entrepreneurship is taught throughout the world with his Lean LaunchPad, NSF I-Corps, and Hacking for X (e.g. Recovery, Defense, Diplomacy, Impact, Energy, etc.) programs.
In short, Steve has dramatically improved the way we practice and teach entrepreneurship.
Why Teaching Entrepreneurship is Hard
One of the very first topics that came up during our conversation was how we all can become more effective instructors.
Roughly 75% of college faculty are adjunct or non-tenure-track professors. Steve shared that as a practitioner, one of the challenges he faced was not what to teach, but how to teach:
”There is usually very little onboarding in place to train professors in the most effective way to teach entrepreneurial lessons.”
While most of us are successful entrepreneurs or successful professors, very few of us are equally great at both.
Compounding the problem, Steve mentioned that there are so many kinds of entrepreneurship – small business, high tech, corporate, social, family business, etc.
With these challenges in mind, I asked Steve for recommendations to overcome them.
Steve’s Teaching Tips
Tip #1: Accept You Don’t Know Everything
“I see my mentors and other adjuncts and coaches make this mistake, in thinking your domain expertise is the expertise of entrepreneurship rather than a very narrow slice.”
When Steve first began teaching at UC Berkeley, he was paired with professor John Freeman who recommended he sit in on other instructors’ entrepreneurship courses. Steve mentioned, “the shock to my system, the discovery…there are different types of entrepreneurship.”
Steve was a successful entrepreneur, but he wasn’t a successful small business, high tech, corporate, social, and lifestyle entrepreneur.
Each type of entrepreneurship has different goals and to be taught most effectively, requires a different approach and expertise. To illustrate his point, Steve mentioned that in high tech entrepreneurship, the first goal is to have a seed round that raises millions of dollars. In small business entrepreneurship, however, the first goal may be to make enough to fund a lifestyle and family.
It’s this diversity in objectives that can make effectively teaching innovation difficult and it was his realization that he didn’t know everything about every type of entrepreneurship that led Steve to increase his breadth of knowledge.
Tip #2: Get a Mentor
Luckily, Berkely had a semi-formal onboarding process in place which sped up the learning process for new faculty. For other educators who do not have access to that kind of program, Steve recommends:
Attending other entrepreneurship instructor’s classes
If you’re an entrepreneur first, get another educator to mentor you
If you’re an academic first, pair with an entrepreneur to teach
Like we teach our students, teams with aligned goals and diverse skills have better outcomes; the same applies to our teaching. To improve your classes, find people who have a different set of skills and experiences than you and collaborate with them.
When in Doubt: Experiences Teach Skills
“If you’ve never started a company and you’re teaching entrepreneurship, it’s like teaching a med school class and never having cracked a chest.”
Entrepreneurship is a combination of theory and practice and our students learn it best when they are offered by perspectives.
Steve further explained his point by saying, “Startups are essentially years of chaos, uncertainty, and terror. That’s not what a typical academic career is like. And so it’s kind of hard to teach tenacity, resilience, and agility and maybe curiosity, which are the key skills for early-stage entrepreneurs without having lived with that uncertainty.”
Students Learn Best By Doing
How do we teach customer empathy, customer development, and customer discovery effectively?
The answer is learning by doing. When Steve teaches his Lean LaunchPad classes, he insists his students talk to 10 customers each week. And he always follows up to ensure they actually made contact.
For an engaging way to help your students understand exactly what questions they should and shouldn’t ask customers, you can also use our free experiential Customer Interviewing Cards lesson plan.
The same goes for every topic in entrepreneurship:
Idea generation
Solution ideation
Finance
Pitching
Every entrepreneurship skill must be practiced to be internalized.
The Future of Entrepreneurship Education
Key skills for early-stage entrepreneurs can be taught with the right combination of theory and experiential exercises.
In class, Steve looks to create a feeling that there is no “right” answer that can be found in a book. It is this approach that encourages students to figure things out for themselves and inspires outside-the-box thinking. The Lean LaunchPad methodology Steve created is great for stimulating the chaos of entrepreneurship. It is this chaos that identifies those students ready for the pursuit of entrepreneurship.
Steve conceptualizes his classes as the Juilliard of entrepreneurship; when the way to train artists was with an experiential, hands-on apprenticeship. With this in mind, Steve thinks successful entrepreneurship curricula should include entrepreneurial appreciation.
“These core [entrepreneurship] courses will be the new liberal arts courses of the 21st century.”
Takeaways
Here are my takeaways from the first part of our conversation:
Get a mentor. If your background is in academia, find an entrepreneur to mentor you in real-world realities. If you’re an entrepreneur, find an academic mentor who can teach you about teaching. Teaching entrepreneurship requires both.
Train entrepreneurs like artists. Just like are no “right” answers in art, there are no right answers in entrepreneurship. Instead of focusing on teaching answers, we should focus on teaching skills.
Students learn skills by practicing them. Experiences, not textbooks, are the best way to teach skills.
Check Out Part 2
Click here for the second part of our conversation where we discuss:
The necessary skills professors should teach their students, and
Four courses he thinks are essential to a robust entrepreneurship program
And subscribe here for more interviews with entrepreneurship education thought leaders:
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:
“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 Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviews, and the right questions to ask.
Online Entrepreneurship Syllabus. This online entrepreneurship syllabus is an innovative online experience that is asynchronous with multiple touchpoints, skills-based, and experiential.
Whether you’re teaching online, face-to-face, or a hybrid of the two, we built our Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) to provide award-winning engagement and excitement for your students
We’ve taken the guesswork out of creating an engaging approach that works both online or in-person. ExEC has a comprehensive entrepreneurship syllabus template complete with 15 weeks of award-winning lesson plans that can be easily adapted to your needs.
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!
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 to teach your students:
Where to find customers to interview during a quarantine
We’ve made this exercise as easy to integrate as possible.
Interviewing Customers 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 are 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!
If you’d like to lower student anxiety around customer interviews, try this series of experiences:
