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.
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 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
“I can see this course will be the furthest thing from what I had anticipated – but in a great way!” – Jessie S. (student)
I learned about The Wish Game that Rebeca Hwang conducts in her Stanford entrepreneurship course, and my mind exploded with ideas for my MBA course! I threw out my plans for that course and redesigned the entire course around this one activity.
A Quick Review
Students write down big, specific wishes, such as being able to meet a celebrity, or visiting a certain place. The professor chooses one person to be the wish grantee, and the rest of the class works all week to deliver that wish at the beginning of the next class session.
This exercise is about hyper-collaboration, so all students benefit by working together under considerable constraints. I saw this as a powerful path to students learning entrepreneurial skills like ideation, customer interviewing, prototyping, selling, and mobilizing resources through iteratively practicing them.
Learning My Students’ Perspective
I purposely did not share my syllabus or any details of my class with my students prior to the first day. They tried (hard!) to get details, but I remained stoic in my refusal to ruin the surprise.
On the first day of class, I introduced myself, highlighting some details about me that show students I tend do things differently. The kind of details I shared:
I met my wife at a rest area while on the way to Grateful Dead shows
I hitchhiked from New York to Detroit
I have been banned from Canada
Here is my “Who Am I?” slide I show
All 27 students introduced themselves by sharing their name, favorite concert, and something unique or interesting about themselves.
I want to understand the context my students exist in when they are in my course, so I next put them through the Fears and Curiosities exercise. In this exercise, students post Post-It Notes on the wall that contain
the things they fear when thinking about life after their MBA, and
the things they are curious about when thinking about life after their MBA
What they fear most is not enjoying their job, not making enough money, and not being successful.
What they are most curious about relates to finding & enjoying their job, to maintaining & building new relationships, and to relocating/independence.
I explained to the students that the skills they would practice in this class would help them directly address those fears, and directly explore those curiosities.
I next wanted to understand how these students conceptualized “entrepreneurship” and “innovation”, so I showed this slide:
The students identified fairly typical topics, such as:
Ideas / opportunities
Problem-solving
Selling
Prototyping
Customer and Market Research
Legal Considerations
Strategic Planning
We discussed why these topics, I added some of my own from my experience, and then I moved into introducing the course.
Students sat up straight. I saw the anticipation building in them. It was really cool to watch!
I explained the core skills I invited them to practice throughout the course:
After this point, just to build the anticipation to a fever pitch, I asked students how they were feeling. Aaron G. said
“I think this class will challenge me in new ways that I have not been challenged in before, and quite frankly, I imagine they are the things I need to work on most.”
Introducing The Wish Game
I finally introduced The Wish Game, explaining they would each come to class next week with three wishes and their name written on a piece of paper. I stressed these wishes needed to be specific, they should be meaningful, and they should be big, and let them know we’d come back to that to practice a bit so they understood better. Next I explained the following steps we would follow:
I saw blank stares of complete confusion, maybe dismay, a healthy dose of fear, and a pinch of regret here and there. But what I saw overwhelmingly was a mix of curiosity and excitement.
“This is the unknown. It scares me, but excites me at the same time. I feel safe because I believe Doan will be a good guide on this journey. But I also feel scared, because it is such a different way of learning. I can’t wait to get started!” – Michael (student)
There are a few ground rules I shared with the students:
Have fun!
Do nothing illegal, & nothing you wouldn’t tell your grandmother about face-to-face
I contribute $50 per wish, and each of them contribute $10 per wish. Unused funds roll over to the following week
If they want to meet somewhere other than our classroom to deliver the wish, they had to tell me by Sunday evening
Practicing The Wish Game
My three wishes would be:
Have a conversation with my sister Laura, who passed away in 1998
Walk on Saturn
Hit the winning shot of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game
I guided the students through brainstorming how they would deliver the Saturn wish next Tuesday. One student mentioned I would need a space suit, so they could buy a space suit costume from Amazon. Many students Googled facts about Saturn – one mentioned the temperature there is -178 degrees Celsius. Another student volunteered that they should fill the costume with ice so I would be REALLY cold.
Some students began discussing the possibilities of using virtual reality. They assumed someone built a program about Saturn, so I encouraged them to find out. They couldn’t find one so they abandoned that idea.
One students suggested rigging me up in a bungee apparatus and suspending me from the ceiling so I felt weightless. (Now we were talking!)
Once the buzz rose to a crescendo and I knew the students were thoroughly excited and engaged in brainstorming ideas to deliver my wish, I gave them their task for the next week. It was to pilot test their wish-granting skills with my son (he’s the good-looking one in the middle down there).
We chose the “See the Mona Lisa” wish. After collecting money, the students had $330 available to spend (I let the students know that if they had financial hardship, they did not have to contribute, so some did not). The class set about brainstorming again.
Some mentioned virtual reality. Some mentioned drawing it on the board. Others mentioned purchasing a replica. One woman asked if she could interview my son. I called him and they asked him questions about why this wish, what it was about the Mona Lisa he liked, had he been to France, etc.
Many of their questions were very ambiguous questions that my 13 year old son had some trouble answering, but some were pretty specific about what he liked about the painting. He mentioned he liked the simplicity. And he mentioned he liked bread and cheese.
Eventually, the class settled on trying to recreate the scene of the room in which the Mona Lisa sits.
A couple students mentioned they have been in that room, that the painting is actually very small, that there are tons of people there and you can’t really see the painting. Students made suggestions about bringing in tons of people, about playing French music, about having people mill around and speak French. The brainstorming and organization was understandably chaotic this first time.
Because I have 27 students in my class, many of them sat silent through this process and a few took the lead. I imagined this might happen, and secretly hoped it did.
I wanted students to feel left out, because I wanted them to come back next week and suggest I split the class in two and deliver two wishes each week (one per group). With 13 weeks in the semester and 27 students, delivering two per week would be great. I wanted the students to want to participate, and to design a solution where everyone could be more engaged. More on that later.
Delivering The Wish
Student did not contact me during the week, other than some fun texts of versions of the Mona Lisa they thought my son might like better than the original, like this one:
I arrived with my son before class and had him sequestered where he couldn’t see the students constructing the wish. I must say I was disappointed at their effort – here is what they brought:
A framed replica of the painting – but much larger than the real one
Baguettes and a variety of cheeses cut on a cutting board
Grape juice in plastic flutes (I told them no champagne, or they would have brought champagne)
A set of retractable belts like you see in airport TSA lines (to block off the painting)
They rested the painting on the whiteboard trough where the markers go, put the retractable belts in front of it, set a chair there, with the bread, cheese and drinks on a table next to it, played French music, and said I should bring my son in.
The next 5 or so minutes were probably the most awkward of my entire life. My son entered, wasn’t sure what to do, nobody said anything, he made his way to the chair, sat for a few minutes, ate some cheese, thanked them for the wish, and left.
We debriefed the experience. Students discussed their confusion, the chaos of brainstorming, and of delegating tasks. We talked about expectations of doing the minimum – doing what is safe – or of stretching for what seems impossible – doing what is uncomfortable. Students shared what they learned – some talked about how difficult collaboration is when the goal is uncertain.
Some talked about how important it was to talk to my son to understand why that particular wish is important to him. Others talked about the frustration of not knowing how they could and should contribute, and also about entrepreneurship being hard. I showed the lessons I hoped we learned (which we absolutely did):
I saw lightbulbs coming on about the potential of this exercise as a learning tool for entrepreneurship and innovation. A realization creeped across their faces that they missed an opportunity. As one student anonymously informed me after class,
“I am sorry we failed in delivering Ethan the experience he dreamed of. We fell short of our potential. Now we understand that we can go big!”
I urged them to take risks, to think big, to put themselves in the wish grantee’s shoes. We talked about how awesome it would have been for Ethan to walk into the room and actually imagine himself being in that room in the Louvre.
I challenged my students that they were capable of recreating that room, and that they missed an opportunity. Not an opportunity to make my son happy, but an opportunity to prove to themselves they could make it happen.
(I felt like what I imagine an Indiana High School basketball coach feels like after a HUGE halftime speech to energize his players).
Playing the Wish Game Again
One student did raise his hand and suggested it was really difficult for 27 students to feel engaged in one wish. Another student piggybacked on this and suggested we split the class into two groups, so that 26 students could have wishes granted instead of just 13. YES!!!!!
We split the class into two groups. I drew two pieces of paper. One had the following three wishes:
Climb Mount Kilimanjaro
Repel down the clock tower at John Carroll University
Sail around the world
The group decided to deliver the wish about the clock tower. This is the highest point on our campus. It will be basically impossible for them to pull this off in reality because nobody is allowed in the clock tower (due to liability concerns), but I’m excited to see what they come up with for this!
Administration Building (ca. 2003), John Carroll University
The other piece of paper had the following three wishes:
Pitch at a Chicago Cubs game
Start a successful business
Win the lottery
The other group decided to deliver the wish about pitching at a Cubs game. Again, not at all possible to deliver in reality, but I’m excited to see what they come up with.
Thoughts on The Wish Game
The experience so far has been what I hoped. The students struggled to grasp the concept. Some jumped in and tried with my son’s wish. They failed at delivering an effective wish, they realized the potential they have, and became very excited .
As one student mentioned to me on the way out of class:
“We are 27 John Carroll University MBA students in an entrepreneurship class. If we can’t take advantage of this opportunity, shame on us. We are excited to do better”
In what I take to be a very good signal for the future of The Wish Game, 12 students emailed me after class Tuesday evening (after 10pm) with three new wishes and asked if they could update their wishes because their original ones were not big enough! This is going to be a fun journey.
An Added Wrinkle Beyond The Wish Game
I knew that The Wish Game wouldn’t be enough for an MBA level entrepreneurship course. I firmly believe it is a vessel in which students can practice critical entrepreneurial skills while practicing generosity and giving. But I was worried it would not be sufficient workload for them.
After we debriefed my son’s wish delivery and before selecting new wishes for the next week, I talked to my students about entrepreneurship in reality. I told them that most people start entrepreneurial projects, ideas, products, services as a side hustle. They had their 9-to-5 gig that paid the bills and gave them stability, but they practiced and built their passion in the off hours and on the weekends.
I told my students that The Wish Game was our 9-to-5 gig that paid the bills; each week they turn in a reflection on that week’s experience, that I grade with the following rubric.
Just like entrepreneurs who work on their side hustle, I want students to have the opportunity to work on ideas they are passionate about. I asked students to share a 30 second video in a discussion board on our learning management system about an idea they are passionate about.
Specifically, I asked them to state the problem they want to solve, what group of people experience that problem, and what their solution to that problem is. I asked students to watch every video, and let me know the top three ideas they want to work on.
This semester I will give my students the tools through our learning management system and guide any of them who want guidance through the journey of turning their ideas into reality; this will happen mostly outside of class time and will not be graded.
This is an opportunity for them to engage or not, to make choices about how they spend their time and resources. Much like an entrepreneur must decide how to spend her time – with family or building a business – and his resources – on a vacation or building a business.
Want To Follow Doan’s Journey?
We will run a series of blog posts highlighting Doan’s journey throughout his semester-long Wish Game Course this Spring.
Steve Blank is one of the most influential people in modern entrepreneurship education, and he wants to answer your questions about teaching entrepreneurship.
In addition to being a successful (and more importantly failed) entrepreneur, Steve is the creator of customer development, an instructor at Stanford, UC Berkeley, NYU and Columbia, the developer of Lean Launchpad and helped popularize the Business Model Canvas. Steve has graciously agreed to speak with us, the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org community, about how he:
Increases student engagement
Helps students conduct high quality customer interviews
Ditches the textbook and makes entrepreneurship classes real
Sees the future of entrepreneurship education
Steve will be accepting the entrepreneurship education lifetime achievement award at this year’s USASBE conference and agreed to sit down for an interview with us about how to continue innovating the way we teach innovation and entrepreneurship.
Interview with Steve Blank
The Future of Real Entrepreneurship Education
Ask Steve anything about entrepreneurship education.
Steve is first and foremost an entrepreneur, both successful and failed. After his two major entrepreneurial failures, one dotcom home run, and several base hits, he retired from entrepreneurship and began teaching. As he codified what distinguished his entrepreneurial successes from his failures, he developed the process of customer development, which is now the bedrock of much of today’s entrepreneurship education.
Steve has taught customer development at Stanford, Columbia, NYU, and UC Berkeley, at one point teaching a young man named Eric Ries. Ries, inspired by Steve’s customer development framework, combined it with another tool that Steve popularized – Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas – and agile software development to form the three pillars of what would become known as Lean Startup.
Customer development, the Business Model Canvas, and Lean Startup are all possible and/or popularized because of Steve, and have revolutionized the way entrepreneurship is executed and taught throughout the world.
We couldn’t be more excited to sit down with him and ask him your questions, as well as our own, about the future of entrepreneurship education.
Interview with Steve Blank
The Future of Real Entrepreneurship Education
Ask Steve anything about entrepreneurship education
Gathering information from customers is the most valuable skill an entrepreneur can practice.
Two common methods for collecting that information are surveys and customer interviews. Customer interviews are, hands down, more valuable for entrepreneurs than surveys because they:
Provide the depth of insight to validate problem hypotheses
Provide emotionally driven marketing copy from the customer’s perspective
Identify high potential marketing channels
Identify realistic competitors, and competitive advantages
Provide potential pivot opportunities, by eliciting alternative problems to solve if hypothesized problem is not one customers are seeking a solution to
The qualitative nature of interview-based research gives entrepreneurs the chance to dive deeply into the problems and emotions a potential customer is feeling. It’s those feelings that the entrepreneur will ultimately resolve that will lead to their success.
Surveys in entrepreneurship classes, on the other hand, largely avoid addressing customers’ underlying emotional needs, because few, if any, potential customers will complete a survey about their feelings. Instead, customer surveys in entrepreneurship classes often use leading questions in an attempt to do the impossible – predict future customer behavior:
Would you use a product that does ______________?
How often would you use a product that does ________________?
How much would you pay for a product that does ______________?
The result of these surveys is that students either confirm their bias that there’s high demand for their product without discovering the emotional ways customers describe their problems, or they conclude there isn’t sufficient demand, leaving them without any actionable next steps either way.
Validation surveys provide no actionable marketing strategy if demand is “confirmed”, and no potential pivots if demand is “invalidated.”
While surveys have the allure of producing statistically significant data, statistically significant data on people’s predictions of their own behavior aren’t worth anything – especially in terms of business model validation. If we really want to answer questions like how much customer will pay for a product, there are far more effective ways of doing that than surveys, for example, selling pre-orders.
If we believe interviews are a far more powerful tool than surveys for business model validation, the question becomes:
How do we show students interviews are more powerful than surveys?
In our Surveys vs. Interviews Lesson Plan, we provide an experience that will demonstrate to your students just how much more effective interviews are than surveys, by having them complete both experiences, and compare them.
Emotionally Intelligent Innovation. Here they learn that customer problems are the most effective place to look for value propositions, and
Idea Generation. Here they hypothesize the customers for whom they are uniquely suited to solve problems, and they hypothesize the problems they are uniquely suited to solve
With this background, they begin figuring out how to test those hypotheses.
Step 1: Problem Survey
Before class, ask your students to complete a Challenges Survey (find a sample in the lesson plan). Your students will be asked questions about the problems they face and how they have tried solving those problems.
In ExEC, we provide results from thousands of students at the universities using the curriculum so you can highlight how difficult it is to validate hypotheses about problems students face using a survey. What we find, and what your students will likely produce, are:
Low volume of responses
Short answers, with little emotional depth
Some responses aren’t even comprehendible
Step 2: Surveys vs. Interviews
Start class discussing with students the pros and cons of asking customers about their problems using surveys and using interviews. Each method of validation has pros and cons, as highlighted below. After the discussion, show this table and highlight any relevant points. Let students know they will now experience these differences.
Surveys Pros
Surveys Cons
Customer Interview Pros
Customer Interview Cons
Fast
Difficult to get responses to open-ended questions
Higher quality information
Takes longer to facilitate than surveys
Can produce statistically significant results
Don’t provide insights on an emotional level
Significant emotional depth
Results aren’t statistically significant
Difficult to probe/ask follow-up questions
Probe as deeply as necessary by asking follow-up questions
Often expensive (in time and money) to collect enough quantitative data to be statistically significant
Can explore multiple problems
Step 3: Discuss Their Survey Experience
In the lesson plan, we guide you through a conversation with your students about this surveying experience. First, discuss why some students did not complete it. Then transfer those reasons to customers from whom they want to gather information. Next discuss what it felt like completing the survey, and how much emotional depth they provided.
Step 4: Interview Experience
We then guide you through introducing your students to customer interviewing. In groups, students will experience being interviewed, interviewing, and taking notes/observing. In these groups, students will ask and answer the same exact same questions from the survey, but in a format that’s much more conducive to problem validation.
Step 5: Compare their Survey vs Interview Experiences
The lesson ends with a discussion, focused on two key points:
Comparing the quality and depth of information gathered through each method, and
Comparing the ability to validate problem hypotheses using the information gathered through teach method
This is where the magic happens, as you reveal that in both their survey and interviews, they answered the exact same questions. As professor Emma Fleck told us after this lesson:
“I genuinely feel that this was a light bulb moment in my class. Students were frustrated and angry about this survey and didn’t see the point. However, 2 days later, when we did this as customer interviews, I was able to illustrate to them how much I could learn from using a different format with customers. They really started to understand as many of them had taken marketing research classes and were convinced that all of their customer learning would come from surveys!! Great exercise.”
Key Takeaways
This is a powerful lesson for students as they begin their entrepreneurial journey. It engages them in two important methods for gathering information to validate aspects of their business model. But more importantly, it offers two benefits:
Students feel the benefit of interviewing as a hypothesis validation tool.
Students practice customer interviewing. They learn how to be able to talk to anyone about their problems, so they can put themselves in a position to solve them.
Below is the complete lesson plan of the Surveys vs. Interviews exercise.
Get the “Surveys vs. Interviews” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Surveys vs. Interviews” exercise to walk you, and your students, through the process, step-by-step.
We are going to help you get students bought into your course by understanding their fears and curiosities.
Learning increases exponentially when we put the information and skills into a context that is top-of-mind for our students. In other words,
Put your course material into a context that matters for your students, and the learning comes alive.
We work very hard to understand what context matters to our students. But we often don’t even scratch the surface. Most students keep an emotional distance from their professor and hesitate to discuss their context.
To discover the context that matters to the students, we need to understand what is top-of-mind for them. We can then place the learning in their “right now” context. Student learning will soar. The classroom will buzz with excited energy.
Understanding what’s on students’ minds requires only two simple questions.
What Are You Thinking About Right Now
This post is an effective way to understand what is on students minds right now. For full details, check out the complete lesson plan.
Stop for a moment: what are you thinking about right now, at this very moment?
What is top-of-mind for any of us at any given moment are the things we are afraid of and those we are curious about. Here are some fears you might have right now:
Embarrassing yourself in that class you’re teaching in 10 minutes
Your manuscript you submitted two months ago will get rejected
You’re not spending enough time with your children
You are about to buy the wrong house.
The fears on your mind right now might be big or small, but they are there.
You are also curious about a variety of things right now. Here are some things you might be curious about right now:
What is for dinner?
Will I get tenure?
How does [fill in name of professor you look up to] relate so well to his/her students?
Should you get a labrador retriever or a Jack Russell Terrier? (Doan recommends a lab!)
The things you’re curious about right now might be big or small, but they are there, alongside the fears. This is true of you, and it’s also true of the students sitting in your class. In the lesson plan we offer below, we talk about how to leverage this to get your students bought in. Here is a quick overview.
What Are Your Students Afraid of Right Now
To begin, give each student a stack of post-it notes and a Sharpie. Give students the same color post-it notes and Sharpie (so there is anonymity). The Sharpie is so they can fit very few words on the post-it note. What we want here is the essence of what they are thinking.
Step 1:
Ask students “When you think of life after college, what are you afraid of?” and instruct them to write one thought per post-it note. Tell them that putting their fears into the world can be scary. That is why you’re not asking them to speak them, or to put their name on the notes. If students believe they are sharing their fears anonymously, they are more likely to be honest.
Share a few of the things you are fearful of at this moment – make sure you share some “little” fears and some “big” fears.
Make a strong point that quantity is the goal, not quality. Urge students to get as many fears onto post-it notes as they can
Tell them when they finish to hand you all their fear post-it notes. Your job is to stick them randomly on a wall – do not group them by student, but mix them up all over a large wall.
Step 2:
Ask the students to organize the notes into fear clouds by grouping them together by general category/theme, without talking. Give them a few examples – things relating to budgeting money, or to making friends, or to being happy. Then ask students to name the groups.
**NOTE: You may have to help them by aggregating some categories. For instance, you will likely have many categories that relate to financial management. Combine all those into one “Financial Management” category
Here are the fear categories Doan has assembled over many years’ of his courses:
Fear Category
Example Statement
% of Total Mentions
Financial Management
"Not making enough money"
22
Getting a Job
"Not being able to find a job"
15
Job Dissatisfaction
"Not being happy at work."
11
Job Performance
"Not performing well in my job."
8
Relationships (losing)
"Growing apart from friends and family."
6
Purpose
"Not chasing my dreams."
5.5
Work/Life Balance
"Not having enough time to actually live life how I want."
5
Moving
"Where will I live?"
4
Happiness
"Not being happy with my life."
3.5
Relationships (making)
"Making friends in new locations."
3.5
Growth
"Not being prepared to live alone."
3
Failure
"How can I deal with rejection effectively?"
2.5
Missing an Opportunity
"Regretting not doing something."
2
Value of College
"Was classroom knowledge actually useful?"
2
Reputation
"How can I manage my professional reputation?"
1
Success
"Not being successful."
1
Step 3:
Show your students how the material and skills they will learn and practice in your course map onto the things they are currently afraid of.
For instance, if you’re teaching cash flow management or startup financials, relate that to the Financial Management category (how to budget, how it applies to buying a house, etc).
When you teach customer interviewing, talk about how that skill will help them form and strengthen relationships, and how they can use that skill to build a network and identify a job that will give them a sense of purpose.
Show students how the knowledge they will acquire and the skills they will practice apply to the things they are afraid of right now.
What Are Your Students Curious About Right Now
Now we want to shift gears and focus on some fun stuff – what are they curious about? Identify that being curious can sometimes make them feel vulnerable. That is why you’re not asking them to speak their curiosities, or to put their name on the notes. If students believe they are sharing their curiosities anonymously, they are more likely to be honest.
Share a few of the things you are curious about at this moment. Make sure you share some “little” curiosities and some “big” curiosities.
Make a strong point that quantity is the goal, not quality. Urge students to get as many curiosities onto post-it notes as they can.
You will complete the same process you went through with the fears – for full details, check out the complete lesson plan.
Step 4:
Ask students “When you think of life after college, what are you curious about?” and instruct them to write one thought per post-it note. Tell them when they finish to give you all their curiosity post-it notes. Your job is to stick them randomly on a wall away from the fear clouds.
Step 5:
Ask the students to organize the notes into curiosity clouds by grouping them together by general category/theme. Give them a few examples – things relating to getting a job, work-life balance, paying off student loans. Then ask students to name the groups.
**NOTE: You may have to help them by aggregating some categories. For instance, you will likely have many categories that relate to financial management (such as paying off student loans, investing, budgeting). Combine all those into one “Financial Management” category
Here are the curiosity categories Doan has assembled over many years’ of his courses:
Curiosity Category
Example Statement
% of Total Mentions
Financial Management
"How do I budget for life after college?"
23
Job Search
"What is the best way to find a job I love?"
14
Where To Live
"Where am I going to live?"
10
Job Fit
"How to find a job that will make me happy and still make money."
7
Education
"How do I apply classroom material to real-life scenarios?"
6
Job Switch
"How long should I stay at my first job if it isn't my dream job?"
5
Relationships (making)
"How to create professional relationships."
4
Work/Life Balance
"How can I best manage my work and social life?"
3.5
Job Choice
"What will I do for a living?"
3
Skills
"What skill will make me stand out?"
3
Networking
"How to build a network."
2.5
Start a Business
"How to afford starting a business?"
2
How to Negotiate
"How to negotiate the terms of a job."
2
Promotion
"How do I move up in a company?"
2
Happiness
"How important is happiness in a workplace?"
2
Relationships (keeping)
"Will I stay in touch with my friends?"
1.5
Success
"How can I become successful?"
1
Gain Experience
"How to gain more experience."
1
Purpose
"How do I find something I love to do?"
1
Benefits
"How does insurance work?"
1
Travel
"Should I travel when I'm young?"
1
Internships
"How to get an internship."
1
Step 6:
Show your students how the material and skills they will learn and practice in your course map onto the things they are currently curious about.
For instance, if you’re teaching prototyping, talk about how they can test out jobs by job shadowing or interning.
When you teach ideation, show them how those skills can help them identify their purpose, find a good job fit, or start a business.
Show students how the application of the skills they will practice applies to the things they are curious about right now.
Your Course in Students’ Context
Return next class session with the fear and curiosity categories mapped onto the content/lessons/modules/skills you cover in the course. For instance, if you lay out each week in your syllabus with the topics you will cover, add one column for “Fears” and one for “Curiosities”. List in each column the fear and curiosity categories to which each particular topic relates.
This last step is the most critical. It is your chance to reinforce the connection between the course material and the things your students are currently thinking about. Show them how you will give them the tools to address each one of their fears, and each one of their curiosities.
Students Now Have the Context to Launch
After this activity, your students will understand the value of the what they are about to learn. They will be more engaged, because the learning is now very real for them.
Below is the complete lesson plan of the Student Fears and Curiosities exercise.
Get the “Student Fears and Curiosities” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Student Fears and Curiosities” exercise to walk you, and your students, through the process, step-by-step.
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!
Rebeca Hwang recently introduced us to The Wish Game – an exercise she uses in her E145 Technology Entrepreneurship class at Stanford University. We all want to increase the intensity and success of teamwork in our courses. Through this exercise, Rebeca accomplished just that.
After hearing Rebeca share about this exercise, our co-founder Doan Winkel realized it could be so much more. He saw it as a transformative entrepreneurship training ground. Doan transformed his upcoming MBA class into one semester-long Wish Game. He will be sharing his journey throughout the Spring semester – follow the journey to see how it goes.
The Wish Game As An Exercise
“Every week, I was looking forward to the Wish Game. It created a sense of excitement all around.” – ENGR145 Student
Step 1: Sharing Wishes
On the first day of class, Rebeca asks students to write down three wishes on one piece of paper. She encourages no boundaries here; examples Rebeca shared include meeting Mark Zuckerberg, or getting a job at Google.
Throughout her E145 Technology Entrepreneurship class, Rebeca chooses one person’s paper from a hat and the rest of the class, working as one, fulfills that wish. If one student significantly helps fulfill a wish, that student gets his/her wish fulfilled next. Paying it forward is a critical part of the Wish Game and an overall goal Rebeca has to WOW her students.
In Rebeca’s class, The Wish Game is about hyper-collaboration; if her students work together under considerable constraints, they all benefit.
Step 2: Planning the Wish
When a wish is picked, students interview the student whose wish was picked. Their goal is to dig beneath the surface of the chosen student’s wish. Rebeca reported that often what the chosen student wants isn’t exactly what they wrote on the paper.
Through this process, students build stronger relationships with each other, and understand the hopes and dreams of each other.
Students practice their interviewing skills each week as they work to better understand how to deliver a truly amazing experience for the chosen student.
Through planning and executing wishes, The Wish Game:
pushes students to think about what resources and assets they have,
pushes them to share those with peers
enables students to build lasting relationships, and
enables students to positively impact on each other.
The Wish Game as a Course
“When I heard Rebeca describe The Wish Game, I sat up straight in my chair and began scribbling ideas on my notebook. I immediately understood the potential this exercise had to be the perfect playground for my entrepreneurship students.” – Doan Winkel
Step 1: Sharing Wishes
The first thing Doan will do in Day 1 of his MBA class (held for 3 hours once per week) is to ask students to imagine their three biggest wishes. He will encourage his students to write down the ones that scare them or make them a little giddy when they imagine that reality. To model this, he will share his three big wishes:
Have a conversation with his sister Laura, who died more than 20 years ago
Step foot on Saturn
Hit the winning shot in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game
Step 2: Planning the Wish
Doan will invite students to talk through how they would plan his wish to step foot on Saturn.
He will push them to think creatively about how they would create that scenario. Doan will challenge them to get into an uncomfortable place in terms of what they think they can accomplish and what they think is possible. His main tool here would be “What if . . .” prompts to push the students to think bigger, or to believe they can execute their ideas.
At the end of this discussion, he will lay out the course structure, as follows, for each subsequent week:
Doan will pick a piece of paper at the beginning of Week 2.
Students will select a leader – a student in charge of strategy and execution.
Students interview the chosen student to better understand the desire for the wish, because often what people share about their hopes and dreams is only surface-level. Doan wants his students to practice digging deep beneath that surface to understand the impetus for the wish. By perfecting their interviewing skills, the students will be more capable of delivering value to their “customer” (the student getting the wish granted in this case).
Once students feel they have a good understanding of the true wish, Doan will excuse the chosen student for the week so the remaining students can plan the wish.
Students plan the wish and deliver it at the beginning of the next class (one week later).
Rinse and repeat; Doan chooses another student and the process begins again.
If one student significantly helps fulfill a wish, that student gets his/her wish fulfilled next. Otherwise, Doan will choose another piece of paper for the subsequent week.
Doan will encourage students to mobilize their resources each week. This could take the form of money (he will set the expectation that each student should contribute $10 to each wish). He will help students understand how to use their network. Perhaps people in their network could contribute advice, or materials, or participation.
Step 3: Assessing the Wish
Doan will assess students in two ways.
Each chosen student will write a reflection one-pager, sharing his/her perspective of the experience, and grading the accuracy and the impact of the delivered wish.
Each student who delivered the wish will write a reflection one-pager, sharing his/her perspective of the experience and grading their effort in that wish delivery.
The Wish Game as Entrepreneurship
What excited Doan so much about Rebeca’s Wish Game exercise was the possibility of his students practicing entrepreneurship skills while doing something impactful for others. Each week, students will practice, at minimum, the following skills that are critical elements of entrepreneurship education:
develop and evaluate ideas
interview customers
iteratively prototype under time constraints
mobilize and deploy limited resources
presentation
reflection
Want To Follow Doan’s Journey?
We will run a series of blog posts highlighting Doan’s journey throughout his semester-long Wish Game Course this Spring.
“This was by far the best course I have taken at Stanford, absolutely amazing curriculum.”
Rebeca explains the PBP is a way for students to apply the tools learned during their entrepreneurship course to something near and dear to their hearts…themselves!
To make the elements of the business model relevant, faculty force students to think of themselves as a company. Students do this assignment individually, and ultimately must figure out how they offer value to their world.
“The entrepreneurial process is at its core concerned with ‘the pursuit of opportunity without regard to the resources already under control.’ This process is as applicable to your career as it is to starting a company. The goal of this assignment is to identify where you want to be and how you will get there. Do not worry about your current resources. Think about this with an entrepreneurial mindset.”
Most important of all, the assignment works, and Rebeca’s students love it.
“make sure you spend a lot of time on the personal business plan, it is worth it! I wish I had spent more time on mine, and will in the future because I think it’s very valuable to think about what your plans and possibilities for life are.”
“Through the personal business plan, it really helped reevaluate what I desire and would like to pursue in life.”
Below is an overview of the Personal Business Plan assignment. For full details, check out the complete lesson plan below.
The Personal Business Plan
Students write at most five (5) pages answering questions about their future vision (such as “What are your values?” and “What personal or professional skills would you most like to develop?”) and about their present plans and passions (such as “What opportunities could help you to achieve your future vision?” and “How will you reach, connect with or influence your customers?”). The full question sets are available in the lesson plan.
In addition to answering these questions, students include at least one exhibit within their five (5) page limit, which can be “any combination of graphics or quantitative analysis [they] desire”.
Examples of exhibits professors give students are:
A resume (current and/or future)
A decision tree showing paths to a number of future career options
A specific “short list” of attractive jobs, company names, and key audiences
Segmentation of different organizations’ readiness to accept your value package using Geoffrey Moore’s adopter categories
A chart addressing the risks, mitigation strategies, etc. associated with your Reality Test
Faculty give students required and recommended readings/viewings to help them prepare an effective Personal Business Plan, all of which are available in the full lesson plan.
In using sources, guide students with the following:
“Failure to use at least one concept from one of the readings will lower your grade. We will reward skill and creativity in applying the concepts with higher grades. On the other hand, don’t get carried away with citing too many sources. We are less interested in having you paraphrase what other people think and more interested in seeing how you think.”
Grading the Personal Business Plan
A team of two graders reads each PBP. One grades in detail, the other reads to make sure the first grader is not too difficult or too easy a grader.
Because this assignment is about trust at its core, students choose who grades their assignment.
Students are reminded that the grade is not an evaluation of their choice of career path or current life plan, and that only they can decide if their choices will bring them happiness and success.
Professor Tom Kosnik developed a robust grading rubric for this assignment, which is included at the end of the lesson plan.
Because this assignment is worth 20% of their grade, students take it very seriously. Because this assignment is about them and their future, students invest tremendously in it, and receive incredible value from doing it.
We are grateful to Rebeca Hwang, Tom Kosnik, and the faculty who teach E145 Technology Entrepreneurship at Stanford University for sharing this amazing exercise.
Key Takeaways
Because students are applying business model components to themselves, they deeply engage in learning these components and have a very clear understanding how to apply them.
Through this assignment, students will learn to see themselves as a company, and that they must continuously invest in and develop a plan for. They will also deeply embrace the tools and methodologies they learned in the course because they are applying them to their future. They will see that learning is meaningful when applied to a personal context.
Get the “Personal Business Plan” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Personal Business Plan” exercise to walk you, and your students, through the process, step-by-step.
Rebeca Hwang Entrepreneurship Lecturer Stanford University
“Take it. It’s a life changer.”
Rebeca Hwang works in one of the most competitive teaching environments, with some of the most demanding students in the country. In that context her entrepreneurship class achieves a stunningly high (96%+) positive feedback rating. Her evaluations include quotes like “one of the best classes at Stanford”. Students recommend her course to others by describing the life-long impact she’s had on them.
We wanted to learn how Rebeca creates such a transformative and highly regarded course. My colleague Justin Wilcox reached out for a conversation, and Rebeca graciously agreed to share some of her secrets.
During the conversation, we discovered several things Rebeca does differently in her ENGR 145 Technology Entrepreneurship class than most of us entrepreneurship instructors. Below we lay out four Rebeca-inspired-techniques to create a more engaging, challenging and life-changing learning environment:
Treat your students like customers (WOW! them),
Practice reciprocity culture
Normalize failure
Provide in-depth feedback with objective rubrics
WOW’ing Student-Customers
Most of us strive to create memorable experiences for our students. Few of us can actually WOW our students. Rebeca is one of those amazing few. She tells her course assistants
“We are not teaching a class, we are serving a customer.”
and that their goal is “to wow our customer, to understand and empathize with them, and how the content of what we are delivering to them is going to affect their lives.”
This principle of WOWing customers is the foundation upon which every other principle she adds to the class is built. Treating her students like she would treat customers creates a significantly higher quality learning experience for her students.
What is so impactful is that Rebeca models for her students how to treat the customers in their lives – namely, future employers, coworkers, friends, family members, partners, etc.
The Wish Game
“the Wish Game was amazing because our professor really went out of her ways to complete them, even though they were completely out of her job criteria.” – ENGR145 Student
“Every week, I was looking forward to the Wish Game. It created a sense of excitement all around.” – ENGR145 Student
One way she WOWs her students is through The Wish Game, which Rebeca uses as a path to teamwork and hyper-collaboration. On the first day, Rebeca asks students to write down three wishes on a piece of paper.
These can be anything at all. They have ranged from the mundane to the fascinating to the unreal. Examples are getting a job at Google, meeting Mark Zuckerberg, or meeting Steve Jobs (a real student request after he passed away!).
Every week Rebeca chooses one person’s paper from a hat and one of their wishes gets fulfilled. The entire class as a whole works to fulfill the wish. If one student significantly helps fulfill a wish, that student gets his/her wish fulfilled next. Paying it forward is a critical part of WOWing the students.
The Wish Game isn’t about competition, it’s about hyper-collaboration because if her students help each other, they all benefit.
After picking a wish, students start interviewing the student whose wish was picked. They want to find out what their wish really is, as often it isn’t exactly what is written on the paper. Through this process, students get to know each other, build stronger relationships with each other, and understand the hopes and dreams of each other.
This also helps students practice their interviewing skills, which are a critical skill they work to develop in the course. The Wish Game is fun, but it’s a powerful learning and growth opportunity as well.
The Wish Game pushes students to think about what resources and assets they have, and pushes them to share those with peers. It enables students to build lasting relationships, and to make a positive impact on each other.
Teaching & Modeling Reciprocity Culture
“Before this class, I never thought about how important being able to socialize and make friends is to being an entrepreneur, and mostly just focused on developing my technical skills in the hopes that one day I could use them to start a business. But as we learned in class, in order to get investors, employees, partners, and customers, being able to make friends is one of the most important skills of a successful entrepreneur” – ENGR145 Student
As a veteran of Silicon Valley and of entrepreneurial ecosystems, Rebeca understands that “networking and telling stories are such important components of entrepreneurship.” A big focus of her class is teaching students the fundamentals of what makes a working relationship last.
From day one, students are networking – they have to find team members during the first class session, they learn to talk about their skills and experiences, but also their failures and dreams.
Rebeca shares with her students the tactics to approach someone who is senior to them, and tactics to write an email so people will respond. She focuses intensely on very tactical networking skills that will help student succeed in their Silicon Valley surroundings and beyond.
The most valuable skill Rebeca teaches her students is the principle of reciprocity, which is
“the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit, especially privileges granted by one country or organization to another.”
She urges her students to think, before meeting a person, what can they provide that person. In building a relationship it is important to have a strong willingness to learn, but it is equally important to listen well and to desire to give back.
Through a consistent message of reciprocity, Rebeca teaches her students that “those who succeed are valuable to the network.” She has found it is quite contagious in her students once she plants the seeds of this mindset.
Normalizing Failure
“[this course] taught me that successful people are the ones who actually get out and try – and don’t even consider failure.” – ENGR145 Student
“I used to often not got to events or apply for opportunities because I thought I would fail anyway. But not trying is already a failure and if I try and fail, I may learn something in the process.” – ENGR145 Student
When Rebeca and her course assistants introduce themselves to students on day one, they start with “My name is ______, and I’m going to share a failure with you.” From the first moment, Rebeca works to make failure a part of her class’ culture, to normalize it for her students so when it happens they can navigate it as a learning experience.
Through a variety of experiences, Rebeca brings the realities of entrepreneurship into her course, including failure. She brings in a litany of speakers to share stories with her students.
These speakers are not typical entrepreneurs, but have all done amazing things outside entrepreneurship. Things like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. Or running ultramarathons. Rebeca carefully chooses speakers who can teach her students that in anything in life, extremes aren’t necessarily bad in terms of dreaming and aiming high.
She wants her students to hear realistic stories of small failures and struggling to achieve big goals. Rebeca introduces them to the depression and founder suicide problems in Silicon Valley. She wants them to know about grinding it out, about sleepless nights, about not getting the meeting, or not getting the next meeting.
Failure is a major aspect of entrepreneurship, and Rebeca doesn’t shy away from this in her course. She wants her students to embrace failure as a reality and a chance to learn and grow.
In-Depth Feedback With Objective Rubrics
Assessment is something we all struggle with. How can we be effective and efficient? Rebeca found her magic combination in well-defined rubrics that students get ahead of time and personal in-depth feedback.
Rebeca gives her students all the rubrics on the first day of class. They therefore feel comfortable because they know their grade won’t be an arbitrary decision. They can see their pathway to the grade they want or need for graduate school, for a scholarship, or to keep mom and dad happy.
Rebeca spends roughly three (3) hours per day outside class working with students. This includes personal interactions, office hours, and always providing in-depth feedback on student progress and projects.
What Can You Do?
Rebeca Hwang’s formula for success in her course is WOWing customers, modeling reciprocity, normalizing failure, and using a very clear and personal feedback system.
We each approach our courses differently, due to our own backgrounds and experiences, and due to our institutional context and culture. Rebeca shows us that within the walls of our classroom, and within the minds of our students, we can achieve extraordinary results.
We can inspire our students, we can change their career trajectory, we can teach them skills to decipher their world. The list of gifts we can offer our students is endless.
Rebeca found a formula that has proven extremely successful; as one of Rebeca’s students said:
“If you are considering a future as an entrepreneur and don’t know where to start from, take this course. If you have an idea but are looking to explore how it can work in the silicon valley, take this course. If you just want to learn how to be a team player, take THIS Course!”
What is your formula?
The Nitty Gritty of Rebeca’s Class
Rebeca’s students are mostly upperclass undergraduate students, and roughly 1/3 are international students. Most of Rebeca’s these desire to start a company at some point, and they are a solid interdisciplinary mix of designers, creatives, engineers, and business experts.
Because some students have started companies and some have not, Rebeca’s students have different relationships with entrepreneurship; they have some exposure to it and are very interested in learning more about it, but they come to the course with different levels of expertise.
Rebeca doesn’t focus on building expertise in the usual conceptualization. Her students learn about the spirit of entrepreneurship; she approaches her class as giving students tools, methodologies, and strategies they can use in life. Students experience an emphasis on acquiring a skill set to decide what career to pursue and to solve problems in all aspects of their life.
Here is the full interview with Rebeca in case you would like to dive deeper on any aspects.
Who is Rebeca Hwang?
Prior to co-founding Rivet Ventures a venture capital firm that invests in male and female founders that target women-led markets, Rebeca Hwang co-founded YouNoodle, Cleantech Open, and Startup Malaysia. Rebeca was educated at MIT and Stanford and has been recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and as one of the top 35 under 35 Global Innovators by MIT Tech Review.
Rebeca serves on the Global Board of Kauffman’s Global Entrepreneurship Network. She was born in Seoul, raised in Argentina and educated in the US, and has worked closely with several countries on their national startup programs, including Malaysia, South Korea, Spain, Iceland, Chile and Mexico, and was a member of the Board of Advisors of the Mexico-U.S. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Council.
Recently listed by Forbes as one of their 20 inspiring young female founders to follow on Twitter, Rebeca is a frequent speaker at global conferences on entrepreneurship. Her TED talk on the power of diversity within yourself has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times.
Want More from Rebeca and Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Program?
We’re running a series of blog posts highlighting Rebeca’s outstanding class, including a number of exercises she runs in her class. Subscribe below to ensure you get those.
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The Updated Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC)
At least that’s what we’re trying to do. The feedback from our pilot professors tells us we are doing pretty well. There have been hiccups, and learning moments, but our agile team and processes have allowed us to respond promptly and create an engaging user experience for both professors and students.
Now in Over 40 Universities
At this point last year, our the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) was in roughly 20 schools. Strong demand for a structured, experiential, 15-week entrepreneurship curriculum has doubled the number of universities we’re in.
Of course, being a new venture determined to help students learn how to create new ventures, we’re adamant that we…
Practice what we preach!
We gather feedback from professors and students after each lesson. Through this, we focus on how they felt teaching the lesson (professors) or completing the lesson (students):
We interview professors multiple times during the semester. Our team invites students to talk with us so we can learn more about how they feel living the curriculum, what we are missing, and what we are doing well.
We work tremendously hard to gather, analyze, and constantly make updates for next semester, not “next revisions” like traditional textbooks. The ExEC you see today is a result of our vision and assumptions, continuously tested with students and professors around the world.
While we gather a ton of feedback from our professors, but perhaps the best way to sum up their perspective is what Dr. Chris Welter had to say:
“It’s the software I’ve been looking for for 3 or 4 years . . . I really appreciate the ability for students to get their hands dirty”
New Professor Platform
After practicing what we preach and talking extensively with our professors, it was clear we needed to make some changes to our Professor Portal. We practice what we preach in building our product.
Our original professor-facing version was Google Docs, Slides, and PDFs:
It worked as an MVP and allowed us to test a variety of our assumptions, but ultimately our professors told us Google Docs was too cumbersome to use, and to print from.
So we built a brand new professor platform for our entrepreneurship curriculum! We are currently beta-testing this platform and will roll it out in Fall 2019:
We deliver each of our 31 lessons in a standard format, that includes six core elements for easy navigation and execution for our professors:
1. The Goals and objectives of that lesson. We frame each lesson in practical terms for our professors so they quickly understand why the lesson is important, and what their students will learn.
2. An overview showing where that lesson fits into the scheme and flow of the overall curriculum. We understand it is useful to always understand the big picture – where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going. We also map our entrepreneurship curriculum flow onto the Business Model Canvas to highlight what lessons are applicable for particular boxes on the Canvas.
3. An overview video explaining the lesson, and Google Slides for classroom use. Our goal is for our professors to succeed, and that means providing information and tools. Some use slides and some do not, but we offer them just in case. We know some prefer videos to long text, so we offer both, just in case.
4. Instructions for how to prepare before class, including all the necessary resources. Experiential education is really difficult to execute. We provide our professors with a ton of direction to prepare for each lesson. We want them to succeed, and we want their students to remember each and every learning experience throughout the entrepreneurship curriculum.
5. A minute-by-minute exhaustive outline for delivering the lesson during class. What can we say, we are a but obsessive at times. But we figured more detail was better than less detail.
6. Instructions for what students could and should be doing after class. Let’s be honest – what happens after the class is just as important to a student’s learning experience as what happens within the confines of the particular class period.
Assessment Guide
While testing our first version, one need we heard consistently from professors was guidance on how to assess their students. They loved the experiential nature of the exercises, but they were not always clear on how they could help students understand their progression through the understanding and application of that content. So we built an Assessment Guide into our updated entrepreneurship curriculum to help our professors provide quality feedback to students throughout the process.
During the semester, students progress through 5 Validation Check-Ins. These are basically progressive pitches that act as the main opportunity for assessment. We give our professors rubrics and detailed guidance on how to assess the students’ documents and pitches.
Our goal with assessment is not just to help professors provide a grade, but to help professors provide meaningful and timely feedback to students.
One of the other pieces of feedback we got early on was that professors wanted to use us as the sole resource for their class. To do that though, we needed to add some breadth, in addition to our depth.
We feel confident we cover idea generation, customer interviewing, business modeling, and prototyping comprehensively, but what about finance, legal issues, branding, etc.?
So we conducted an extensive analysis of entrepreneurship curriculum, textbooks and syllabi, and interviewed dozens of the most respected entrepreneurship professors and entrepreneurs. Our goal was to understand what information would be most useful for students beyond our core offering. From that research, we developed an extensive Resource Guide that currently includes 17 modules.
These modules are by no means an complete exploration of the particular topic. Instead we offer an overview of the topic, a deep dive into some of the basics and the critical components of the topic, and then recommend an extensive list of curated resources and readings of that particular topic.
We want our professors to feel comfortable knowing if they recommend their students go through one of our Resource Guides, they will emerge with a solid understanding of the topic and how to apply that content to their context.
We are not the experts all of these topics, but have done considerable research to better inform our professors around these topics of interest. What we offer within each resource guide is an evolving list of additional resources (articles, books, videos, etc.) for students to continue their learning of a particular topic, or for professors to use as additional resources.
This Resource Guide is an evolving offering. As we hear from professors using our ExEC curriculum, or the community of 3,200+ professors reading our blog, that a certain topic is critical in entrepreneurship education, we will build a Resource Guide ourselves, or invite subject-matter experts to help us build one.
LMS integration
Our last major update is integrating with Canvas, D2L, Moodle and Blackboard. In our first version, students and professors had to download and upload documents, assignments, slides, and other materials. We heard loud and clear that this was not a great user experience.
We now offer the capability of uploading all our content neatly into the four learning management systems mentioned above. This will greatly reduce the setup time for our professors, and will provide a more comfortable learning process for the students.
As you can see, we have been hard at work learning what works and what doesn’t with ExEC. We constantly gather feedback from students and from professors. With this feedback, we strive to provide the ultimate experiential learning opportunity to entrepreneurship educators.
Now’s Your Chance!
We’ve been updating our curriculum and platform based on feedback from hundreds of professors and thousands of students. If you are looking for a fully structured, experiential entrepreneurship curriculum, with 15 weeks of lesson plans that students love, an in-depth complementary Resource Guide, and a comprehensive Assessment Guide, you should check out ExEC.
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