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Winning 1st Place at USASBE 2019

Winning 1st Place at USASBE 2019

This year’s USASBE conference, a gathering of hundreds of the best experiential entrepreneurship instructors from around the world, was a harrowing one for us.

We survived a strep throat breakout, an unimaginably poorly timed dead laptop, an all-nighter prepping exercise kits, and lost luggage.

Despite the challenges, or perhaps because of them, this was our favorite conference yet. We shared, we learned, and we got energized to improve our product and process to provide you and your students more value.

This year we:

  • Had 100+ people show up to our TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Happy Hour,
  • Interviewed Steve Blank, the godfather of evidence-based entrepreneurship,
  • Ran three sessions, featuring experiential entrepreneurship exercises from our ExEC curriculum,
  • and the highlight….

We won the Excellence in Entrepreneurial Exercises (3E) competition!

Winning the 3E competition is the highest achievement an entrepreneurship exercise designer can win – the Super Bowl for entrepreneurial pedagogy nerds (that’s us!).

This win isn’t about lower-case us (Justin, Federico, Doan and the rest of the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org team). It is about US – the first version of this exercise was inspired by our work with you, the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org community.

This award is recognition for the work we all do, for the feedback and engagement you have generously provided over the past few years.

The recognition is not an arrival point, but is validation we are on the right track, and an inflection point to co-create even more value for our students.

After winning the 3E competition, Justin and Federico quickly turned their attention (until 4am!) to assembling curriculum kits for our happy hour.

Despite just three hours of sleep, Justin (we call him The Champ!) brought his full high-fiving, chair-jumping energy to the competition the next morning, presenting our Toothbrush Design Challenge with an unparalleled passion that inspired the audience and judges. It was a sight to behold.

 

We also sat down for an hour-long, 1-on-1 interview with Steve Blank on the future of entrepreneurship education.

Thanks to your questions, we had a fantastic conversation that covered:

  • the ideal class an entrepreneurship major should include,
  • the weaknesses of customer development and Lean Startup,
  • the academic research around Lean Startup, and
  • how to balance exposing students to the harsh realities of entrepreneurship, while still making entrepreneurial skills accessible to all students

Click here for the full video as soon as it’s released!

And of course, we had a wonderful time hosting happy hour on Friday night. We celebrated our collective success, and enjoyed demoing some new ExEC lesson plans:

Thank you, for supporting us, for challenging us, and for sharing our passion with your students and colleagues. Our success doesn’t happen without you!

Florida was an amazing host, but we’re already planning for next year’s USASBE conference in New Orleans. We hope you join us!

If you want to introduce your students to the #1 Experiential Entrepreneurship Exercise, request a preview of ExEC here


USASBE 2019 – See You in Florida!

USASBE 2019 – See You in Florida!

Are you going to the USASBE conference in St. Pete Beach, FL in January? You should – we got so much value from last year’s conference.

This conference is an incredible few days of entrepreneurship educators and folks planning entrepreneurship programs sharing their work and ideas.

If you’re going, we’ll see you there!

Friday Night Party

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first. We’re hoping to host our second-annual happy hour party Friday night after the conference activities. We’ve got room for 100 USASBE Conference attendees to join us, so register here if you’d like to attend.

3 Talks + A Competition

We’ll be leading a handful of sessions during the conference:

  • Mechanical Pencil Challenge: Defining “Early Adopters” And Where To Find Them (Fri. @9:30 am in the Banyan room & again Sun. @9:30 am in Blue Heron).

This exercise uses mechanical pencils, and a 10-minute competition between attendees, to introduce Early Adopters. We contrast them with Early Majority and Late Majority customers, and demonstrate where and how to find a business model’s Early Adopters.

  • A Better Toothbrush: Testing Assumptions Via Customer Observations (Fri. @9:30 am in the Banyan room & again Sun. @ 9:30 am in Blue Heron).

This fun and high energy exercise utilizes children’s toothbrushes to help attendees see how easily they can make hidden assumptions that hinder the success of a project. We introduce attendees to customer observations, a tool to mitigate the consequences of hidden assumptions. Overall, this is an engaging Design Thinking exercise that encourages attendees to assume less, and observe more.

  • Rigorously Assessing Experiential Courses: Transparent Grading Using Check-Ins, Mini-Cases, And Reflections (Sat. @ 9:30 am in Snowy Egret).

During this session, attendees feel how frustrating it is to be evaluated by vague/subjective criteria. Attendees learn five tools for transparently evaluating experiential courses and then brainstorm ways they can incorporate these techniques in their course. Attendees leave with session with a set of detailed sample rubrics that will enable them to both teach more experientially and assess more objectively.

The Mechanical Pencil Challenge and the Better Toothbrush exercise

…are finalists for the 3E Experiential Entrepreneurial Exercises Competition!

Come cheer us on at 9:30am on Friday in Banyan!

Hope to see you there!

Justin, Doan and Federico