In upcoming posts, we will share 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:
The NEW Marshmallow Challenge.Use this exercise to teach students why invalidated assumptions hinder all new initiatives, and are ultimately the downfall of most new companies.
Marketing MVPs. In this experiential exercise, students launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to test demand for their MVPs
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!
Lean Startup helps entrepreneurs shift from “build it and they will come” to “Build, Measure, Learn.” So we wanted to know what happens if we apply the same principles to our teaching? Are there benefits to a “Teach, Measure, Learn” loop?
We’ve seen huge benefits (higher student evals, increased enrollment, awards won, etc.), so we wanted to share our process with you.
If you’re looking to increase student engagement give “Teach, Measure, Learn” a shot.
Step 1: Pick a Lesson to Improve
Start small; don’t worry about changing your entire class. The easiest way to get started is by just picking the lesson you’re most excited to improve. How do you decide which one?
Which lesson is the least fun for you?
Which lesson is the least fun for your students?
Whichever lesson you pick, the most important thing is that you feel excited about improving it.
We recently used this process to test some improvements to our Financial projection Simulator.
The next step is to find an instructor whose teaching style you and/or your students really enjoy. How do you find them?
Ask your students who their favorite instructors are.
Are there are instructors at your institution who have won a teaching award (it could be at the College level, at the university level, or on a national level)? Ask around to identify them.
Do you have a colleague at another school whose teaching style you respect? As you’ll see, the person you ask to observe doesn’t need to be from your school!
Once you identify that instructor, ask them to sit in on the class session you want to improve. On the class day, tell your students this instructor is auditing the class session to see how it works. (you don’t want to bias your students by telling them you want to improve the lesson until after it is over).
Doan testing a new lesson plan as Justin observes remotely via Zoom.
Our TeachingEntrepreneurship.org team is fully distributed – I’m in San Francisco, Doan is in Ohio, and Federico is in Italy but with Zoom it’s easy for us to sit in on each other’s classes.
We usually have one camera in the back of the room so we can see the instructor and one camera in the front of the room (sometimes just a phone logged into Zoom) so we can see how students are responding to the lesson.
A camera at the front of the room makes it easy to see when students are engaged and when they are tuning out.
Don’t let location be a barrier to improving your teaching!
With Zoom and a little help from your IT team, you can literally get feedback from any instructor in the world on how to improve a lesson.
Step 3: What Feedback Do You Want?
Before you teach the lesson with your observer, think through what feedback you want. We all teach so differently, it will be important for the person providing you feedback to know the type of feedback you would like on the lesson. Some things we focus on:
Are students engaged during the entire lesson? When does energy drop; when do students start to look zoned out or pick up their phones?
Does the lesson have a successful “ah ha” moment? If not, how might you create one?
Are there any logistical questions that can be eliminated by better instructions (i.e., questions about how to do the exercise aren’t productive, but lessons about how to apply the principles are welcome)
Did students actively and eagerly participate in any discussions? If not, how might you improve the discussions?
Step 4: Ask for student feedback
There’s no better way to model to students how and why they should listen to their customers than when you ask for their feedback.
After teaching the lesson you want to improve, give your students an opportunity to provide anonymous feedback about it. For us, we use a slide like this
which links to a survey like this
All of the information is anonymous (unless students volunteer to give us their email address). We simply ask students to fill out the survey before they leave class.
Step 5: Integrate the Feedback
After the class session, talk with the person who sat in the class as they go through their notes. If the person is an experienced and awarded instructor, ask for tips and tricks for anything they notice. Even if they see something as engaging, positive or productive, ask for their ideas on how you can improve.
If there are points where they offer constructive criticism, or where they saw student engagement wane, ask for specific advice on tips and tricks to improve and combine that with the feedback you got from your students.
Results
By practicing what you preach to students in terms of continuous improvement, you’ll not only increase the quality of your lessons, you’ll also demonstrate to students that you care about them – both of which can lead to improved evaluations.
We use this technique for each of the exercises we release, including all of the lessons in the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC), and the insights we gain have a tremendous impact on quality.
What’s Next?
In upcoming posts, we will share 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:
The NEW Marshmallow Challenge.Use this exercise to teach students why invalidated assumptions hinder all new initiatives, and are ultimately the downfall of most new companies.
Marketing MVPs. In this experiential exercise, students launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to test demand for their MVPs
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!
This revised version of the Marshmallow Challenge is a really fun way to teach the importance of iteration, experimentation, and the value of failure.
This updated exercise will help your students learn:
Why hidden assumptions hinder entrepreneurs
How iteration and experimentation weed out hidden assumptions
Why business experiments replace business plans
Note: if you’re already familiar with the Marshmallow Challenge, here are the key updates in this version:
This exercise isn’t just about team building or ice-breaking; it’s an analogy for business model assumptions, experimentation, and iteration.
Teams build towers twice: once to discover that they make hidden assumptions and once to resolve them.
There is a minimum height requirement to ensure students push their limits (and reinforce the learning objectives).
As homework, students write a short reflection on the dangers of hidden assumptions and the benefits of fast experiments and iterations.
Step 1: The Set Up
Students work in teams of four to build the tallest tower they can using only the provided materials.
Step 2: Build, Launch (and Fail!)
With only 18 minutes to build their towers, teams often follow a similar construction timeline:
~3 minutes: Figuring out who is in charge
~10 minutes: Planning
~4 minutes: Taping spaghetti together
~1 minute: Putting their marshmallow on top
~1 second: Watching the tower crumble under the (surprising) weight of the marshmallow
Be sure to strictly enforce the rules and not give students tips.
The point of this first iteration is for students to experience the failure that comes from not testing their assumptions
For example, students often assume:
Marshmallows are light
Uncooked spaghetti is rigid enough to hold up a marshmallow
Most of the time, students find out these assumptions are incorrect far too late into the exercise to do anything to correct them.
Finish this step of the lesson by asking students what assumptions they made that may have led to their failure. Then ask them, “Do you know who doesn’t make these kinds of assumptions?”
Step 3: Kindergartners
Tell students that this exercise has been completed by a wide range of people and the average tower height is 20 inches tall.
What’s most interesting is that some people consistently perform better. While business school students often struggle, there’s one group of students who do particularly well:
Kindergartners!
Then show a slide like this to your students:
Why Do Kindergarteners Build Better?
First thing: let your students know it’s not their fault – there’s nothing inherently wrong with them. They just made the mistake that virtually every first-time entrepreneur makes:
“You made assumptions about the world that turned out to be wrong.”
In the entrepreneurial context, that typically means making assumptions about who your customers might be, how much they’d be willing to pay for your product, and how many of them there are.
In this case, assumptions about their building materials led to sub-optimal performance, but why would kindergartners be able to build better towers than they could?
Because kindergartners don’t make assumptions!
Kindergartners don’t know that marshmallows are supposed to be light and uncooked spaghetti is supposed to be rigid, so the first thing they do is stick the marshmallow on the spaghetti and see what happens.
In other words, kindergartners don’t know enough about the world to make assumptions so instead of “planning” they naturally spend their time experimenting and iterating.
Tell your students that whenever they’re doing something they’ve never done before (e.g., launching a new product), the best way forward is often to run quick experiments so they can discover the hidden assumptions they’re making.
Once they’ve discovered their hidden assumptions, they’re ready to test out different solutions, which leads us to . . .
Step 4: Iteration
Now that they’ve had a chance to discover their hidden assumptions it’s time to let students act like kindergarteners and iterate and try again!
Give your students another set of supplies and let them build again. When they’re finished, compare the results of their first and second iterations. Use this as an analogy for:
Why serial entrepreneurs are often more successful than first-time entrepreneurs
Why business plans are often replaced by business experiments (e.g., quick experiments lead to more, faster, and validated learning than business plans).
Florida State University students in Ron Frazier’s class
Step 5: Reflection
After class, ask students to write up a reflection on the difference between writing business plans and running business experiments:
When would they want to use a business plan?
When would they want to use a business experiment?
Why?
What if Your Students Have Already Done It?
It’s not uncommon for students to have done a version of the Marshmallow Challenge in another class. That said, they likely did it as an ice breaker or team-building exercise – not with a focus on iteration and experimentation.
Ask any students who have done this previously to form their own team of “experienced builders.” This will enable you to reinforce the learning objectives no matter how tall their towers are:
If the experienced teams build successful towers, you can point to them as examples of the power of iteration (their previous iteration being the first time they did the exercise)
If the experienced teams do poorly, you can cite how important it is to keep practicing the power of iteration throughout our careers – it’s an easy lesson to forget!
Get the Updated Marshmallow Challenge Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Updated Marshmallow Challenge” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
A version similar to the original exercise was also published by Bradley George:
George, B. (2014). Marshmallow Tower. In H. Neck, P. Greene & C. Brush (Eds.), Teaching Entrepreneurship: Challenging the Mindset of Entrepreneurship Educators (p.125-130). Northampton, MA: Edward F. Elgar Publishing.
What’s Next?
In upcoming posts, we will share more 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:
Marketing MVPs. In this experiential exercise, students launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to test demand for their MVPs
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.
Our students live on social media. But do they know how to make the best use of it (or how they’re being used by it)?
With this exercise, your students can . . .
Launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram
Use social media to test demand for their MVPs
Learn how their personal information is used to target them with ads
Step 1: Ad Targeting
The incredible depth and breadth of the information Facebook and Instagram (also owned by Facebook) have on users is astounding.
If your students use Facebook or Instagram, Facebook likely knows things like:
How much money they make
Whether or not they’re in a relationship (and if that relationship is local, long-distance, or even “open”)
Their political leanings
And much, much more . . .
How much more? The first step of this exercise is to introduce your students to how much information Facebook knows about them.
You’ll send your students a link to the “Facebook Ad Targeting Options Infographic” above and ask them to review the dozens of pieces of data Facebook collects and identify the 3 most interesting, obscure, or surprising things Facebook might know about them (they’ll use this information later in the exercise).
Step 2: Design an Ad
With a sense of ways to potentially target social media ads, your students will have an opportunity to design their own ad for a product you provide for them:
A solar-powered phone charger.
Using our free Social Media Ad Generator each student mocks up different ad images, different ad copy, target audiences, etc. to get a feel for how to create ads.
Step 3: Design Their Own Ad
Once students have a feel for how to design an ad using a product you assign them, you can ask them to create one for their own product.
Students repeat the same process they did with the solar power charger, except this time they work with their teammates to design a targeted ad for their companies.
Step 4: Launch Their Ad
(Optionally) You can actually help your students launch their ad.
Using the video below, your students will see how they can design a real ad for Facebook or Instagram and share the ad with you so you can launch it for them and measure how well it performs.
Customizing the Marketing MVP Lesson
This lesson is designed to be easy to customize based on the skills of your students:
An Intro course may only complete Steps 1 – 3, mocking up their ads but not necessarily launching them.
A New Venture Creation may complete Step 4 so students actually see how well their ads perform.
In a capstone or graduate course, each team could produce two different ads and you can run them as A/B tests to see which ad variation performs the best.
There are so many ways to leverage this lesson that demonstrates to students the power of social media marketing!. We hope you give it a try!
Get the Marketing MVPs Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Marketing MVPs” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it.
What’s Next?
In upcoming posts, we will share more 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.
During this somewhat bleak time to be a student we’re finding one exercise, in particular, is having an impact.
Students are reporting:
“I struggle with mental health and I oftentimes get lost in my day to day challenges. This exercise helped me find a path forward.”
“It gets me pumped to learn more entrepreneurial techniques and skills that will help me start my own business.”
“It gets me excited about the future!”
In fact, the student response has been so powerful that we are revamping our full experiential curriculum to make this exercise the first, and a recurring, lesson of the course.
Pilot Your Purpose
Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, but all of us want to pursue our passions.
This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
From music to makeup, to martial arts, we’ve seen students come to life when they realize that entrepreneurship skills can help them make a positive impact in the world while pursuing the things that get them most excited.
If you run this exercise at the beginning of your course and ask students to share their purpose with you, you can make interactions with them more meaningful by tying events from the course back to their purpose.
Set Up The Pilot Your Purpose Exercise
Talk to students about how you know they want to learn things that are relevant to their lives right now. Share with them that entrepreneurship skills will be relevant throughout their career, but that you know it’s hard for them to see how entrepreneurship will be relevant today.
Explain to your students that this exercise will help them understand how entrepreneurship is valuable for them right now, because this exercise will tap into their interests, pique their curiosity, and pull out their passion and purpose.
This exercise will help your students see how entrepreneurship will impact them and their future.
This exercise uses a Google Slides presentation as a digital worksheet. To have their own copies, each student will need a Google Drive account, and ideally will have an iPad or laptop. If a student isn’t able to bring an iPad or laptop to class, they can write down their answers to the questions on paper now, and fill them in later on a computer.
How to Pilot Your Purpose
Your first step when in class is to open the Pilot Your Purpose exercise so you can walk students through it. Direct students to https://bit.ly/PYPurpose (case sensitive) and click the “Make a Copy” button so they each have their own copy to work on.
Interests: Step 1
To identify their interests, ask your students to think about:
What friends say they always talk about
What they would spend time doing if money was no object
What they were learning about the last time they lost track of time watching Youtube or scrolling on social media
Have students text a friend now (in class):
“For my homework I’m supposed to ask you ‘What kind of stuff do I always talk about’”
As their friends write back during class, students can type what their friend texts into the correlating box.
Interests: Step 2
Students now think about how they would spend their time if they did not have to worry about money and they could spend their time doing anything they wanted.
Interests: Step 3
Next, have your students think about how they would like to spend their free time. Students type in what type of content they are watching or interacting when they fall down an online rabbit hole.
Skills: Step 1
To identify their skills, ask your students to think about:
What friends say they are good at
What they would like to get better at doing
What they think they are above average at doing
Have students text a friend now (in class):
“For my homework I’m supposed to ask you ‘What do you think I’m good at’”
As their friends write back during class, students can type what their friend texts into the correlating box.
Skills: Step 2
Students now think about what kinds of things they want to get better at doing – what skills they want to improve upon – and write those in the corresponding box.
Skills: Step 3
As the last step in the Skills section, students think about at what things they are above average, and type those into the corresponding box.
Passion
The next step is for students to identify their passion by combining their interests and skills. Guide students to take note of
What most excites them from their interests slides
What they are most interested in getting better at from their skills slides
In the first two boxes of the next slide, students write down what excites them from their Interests slides and what they are most interested in getting better at from their Skills slides.
In the last box on this slide, have your students think about possible ways to combine what they’ve written in the previous two boxes.
Impact
Students have identified their Passions by looking over their Interests and Skills. Next, you will guide them to think about the kind of Impact they desire to create in the world. To do this, ask students to write down:
Groups of people they would be excited to help
Local problems (in their community) they would be interested in working to solve
Global problems they would be interested in working to solve
Purpose
The last step in this exercise is for students to combine their Passion and Impact to identify their Purpose.
Guide students to review their Passions slide and type in the first box anything that excites them from that slide.
Next, ask students to look at their Impact slide, and type in the middle box anything they excites them.
In the last box on this slide, guide students to think about possible ways to combine what they’ve written in the previous two boxes.
Sharing The Purpose
Students enjoy sharing what they’ve discovered about themselves with others. To facilitate connections between your students and to give them a chance to celebrate what excites them, create groups of 2 – 3 students and invite students to share their Purposes with each another.
After students have had ample time to share their purpose within their small groups, choose a way for you to learn about each of your students’ purposes by having them do one of the following:
Send you a link to their slide deck
Presenting their purpose slide in class to everyone
Recording a video presenting their purpose slide and sending that to you or posting it on the class discussion board
Leveraging this exercise in the first week of class, and strategically revisiting it throughout the course, makes entrepreneurship skills personally relevant to students, regardless of their desire to “become an entrepreneur.”
Why It Works
The result of this exercise is that:
Students identify topics they’re interested in that can be the source of entrepreneurial inquiry.
You discover more about each of your students so that if they end up struggling during your course, you have some clues about how to connect with them in ways that will resonate.
Get the Pilot Your Purpose Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Pilot Your Purpose” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it.
What’s Next?
In upcoming posts, we will share more 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:
Improving Your (Inherited) Course. Inheriting an entrepreneurship course presents many challenges. Re-design the course and provide engaging experiences with this curriculum.
How to Improve Student Outcomes & Evaluations. Journaling can transform your students’ experience in your classroom. And can be a great way to get quality feedback on whether you’re an effective educator
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching 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.
“Your posts help me keep my students engaged – they and I thank you!” – ExEC Professor
Based on the popularity of our 2019 Top 5 Lesson Plans and 2020 Top 5 Lesson Plans articles, 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.
We designed the following exercises and lesson plans to transform your students’ experience as they learn how to stay motivated, prototype, and work with finances.
5. Teaching Business Model Canvas with Dr. Alex Osterwalder
Financial modeling is incredibly difficult to teach in an engaging way.
That’s why, in addition to our more advanced Financial Projection Simulator, we developed a new game that makes introducing financial modeling fun and interactive.
If your students get overwhelmed by financial modeling, this game will help them learn the core concepts in an accessible way.
Imagine your students, in just one hour, building, and launching, an MVP . . . with no technical expertise! In our 60 Minute MVP exercise, we present an exercise during which students build a landing page MVP that:
Tells their customers the problem their team is solving,
Uses a video to demonstrate how the team will solve the problem and
Asks for some form of “currency” from their customers to validate demand.
If you’re looking for an immersive exercise that activates your class, complete with a chaotic, noisy, high-pressure environment, that teaches real entrepreneurial principles, give “60 Minute MVP” a shot.
The Ideal Wallet is an awesome exercise for teaching students to use empathy, prototyping, and iteration to design creative solutions to problems. This exercise that comes from Stanford University’s d.school is a fast-paced way to introduce your students to design thinking.
During this intense exercise, students will learn:
That what is important for them to discover is what is important to their customer
To design solutions specifically related to their customers’ emotional needs
To prototype their design with simple household materials and
To gather customer feedback on prototypes
As a result, students will know how to develop powerful solutions for customers because they can empathize with the person or people for whom they are designing solutions.
Students engage when entrepreneurship feels relevant.
This exercise makes entrepreneurship relevant by helping students discover that entrepreneurial skills will help them pursue their passions – regardless of whether they become entrepreneurs.
This is our favorite exercise because when we help students discover their passions, it becomes clear to them that entrepreneurial skills will help them turn a passion into their life’s purpose.
Suddenly, entrepreneurship becomes relevant and engagement increases
In fact, our students like this exercise so much, we’re making it the first lesson plan in the next iteration of our full Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum.
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.
If you end your entrepreneurship class by having students pitch their companies, you may have seen:
A handful of pitches are great, but most are…meh.
We’ve had luck improving the overall quality of pitches for all students by updating what we want students to pitch.
Pitching the Process
When we shift away from a Shark Tank-style idea pitch to a process pitch, students walk through the iterations of their business model canvases throughout the course, telling the story of:
What assumptions they made along the way
How they tested those assumptions
What they changed in their business model as a result
What assumptions they want to test next
The goal of this Process Pitch is for students to show they have learned a process for finding successful business models. This approach:
Emphasizes skill development
Values testing business models “outside the building”
Engages all students in the process
In process pitches, students demonstrate:
They understand the business model validation process
They applied that process and evolved their business model based on experimentation
The entire process was led by their customers’ emotional needs/problems
The reason this approach is so engaging is because it focuses students on skill acquisition: business modeling, testing business model assumptions, customer interviews, etc. Because you assess students on their process, they are incentivized to test their business model and report accurate results. The emphasis is on the students’ journey, not their outcome; the goal is not success or failure but what they learned during the process.
We recently held a Process Pitch competition for the thousands of students using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum, and students from Cal Poly won with their idea Spruce.ly. Out of many great entries, this amazing team stood out because they:
Demonstrated they learned skills (proven by the number of assumptions they invalidated)
Conducted customer interviews in a way that changed their business model
Ran several experiments including multiple ads campaigns, and user click-mapping on their MVP
Set Your Students Up For Success This Spring
Similar to how we redesigned the antiquated Shark Tank pitches, we created the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) as an engaging experience that accommodates in-person, online, and hybrid classes anywhere from 8 to 15 weeks long.
We weave a cohesive thread throughout the curriculum, with a combination of personally relevant exercises that cohesively teach a set of real-world entrepreneurial skills. Professors at more than 120 colleges and universities find their students highly engaged from the first exercise where students discover their passions to the last experience where they pitch their process.
We created course shells for all of the major learning management systems, so it takes less than 5 minutes to get your new course imported.
This spring, if you want to save time while engaging your students, use “the best entrepreneurship curriculum available” – structured, cohesive, interactive experiences that will engage your students in deep learning.
Engage Your Students This Spring
If you’re looking for classes that buzz with excitement and energy with games, competitions, and activities that engage students while teaching them real-world skills . . .
Preview ExEC and see if it can help you and your students!
What’s Next?
In an upcoming post, we will share information about our upcoming Winter Summit where we will share some exciting new exercises!
Subscribe here to be the first to grab a “seat” at the Summit.
Adopt ExEC today and let us set you up for success by delivering detailed lesson plans and a simplified grading process, and enabling you to deliver award-winning experiential exercises that transform your classroom into a hive of activity from day one.
Engage Your Students This Spring
We’ve been busy updating our curriculum to adapt to your learning environment:
We’ve got you covered whether you’ll be in-person, online synchronous or asynchronous, or some hybrid model.
ExEC is an engaging and structured curriculum that’s flexible enough for your Fall. To fully engage your students this Spring, request a full preview of ExEC today!
Social media marketing is an incredibly powerful tool for entrepreneurs (and an in-demand skill set for employers).
Whether it’s to test demand for their MVPs, or learn more about how their personal information is used, this exercise will help your students see just how powerful social media marketing is.
With the exercise and techniques we discuss in this class, we’ll show you how to engage all students in entrepreneurship, regardless of their desire to become an entrepreneur, so they can develop their entrepreneurial skills.
If you teach an intro or elective entrepreneurship course, this workshop is for you!
If there’s one thing we know about textbooks, it’s that . . .
Students dislike them.
Too out of date to be relevant, too boring to be worth reading, and too expensive to be worth buying, textbooks aren’t the best way to teach entrepreneurship skills (or engage students).
To engage a generation of students who have grown up in a digital media environment, what’s needed is a way to . . .
Meet Students Where They Are
Textbooks can’t compete with the dynamic, personalized spaces our students are used to.
Can you blame students for not being motivated to read a “riveting” chapter on entity formation when Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu all have queues of personally recommended shows vying for them to watch (not to mention curated profiles from Instagram, TikTok, and Tinder to check out)?
What if instead of having to use quizzes to compel our students to read bland, out-of-date textbooks, we produced content that was more personalized and engaging than the Netflix’s of the world?
This Spring, we’ll take a step in that direction. Starting in January, your students can have . . .
In a major update to the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC), students will be able to personally define and customize their entrepreneurial experiences.
A Student-Led Experience
With the new ExEC experience, students customize the content to suit their interests.
Unlike the “read-only” experience students get with textbooks, with the new ExEC, students literally edit the content based on their interests and business models.
The process starts with . . .
1. Identifying “Their” Customers
One of the most powerful ways to engage students is to make your course more about them than the subject you’re teaching. In other words . . .
What if instead of teaching an entrepreneurship class that may one day help your students pursue their passions, you taught a course on pursuing their passion – that happened to leverage entrepreneurship skills?
You’d cover the same content, but by prioritizing your students’ motivations, you automatically make the content more engaging.
That’s precisely what the new ExEC experience does.
Asking students questions about their interests and skills, and the people they’re most passionate about serving, students literally update their reading material to reflect the customers they’re most excited to serve:
At this early stage of the class, when the #1 goal is to engage students . . .
Who their customers are isn’t as important as how excited they are to serve them.
The students will find out for themselves whether their segment is a part of the business model validation process. Our job right now is to help the students find a set of customers they’re eager to go through the validation process with.
Soon, the students will start interviewing their customers, but in order to do that, they need to discover. . .
2. Where Are Their Customers?
You can’t interview a customer unless you can find them, so ExEC uses interactive prompts to guide students through a process that’s customized for their customer segment.
The results of which are a specific, actionable “channel” to use to find customers to interview:
In preparation for their interviews, students are ready to discover . . .
3. Good (and Bad) Customer Interviewing Questions
Using an interactive card game, students discover the right and wrong questions to ask during their customer interviews:
After completing a round of 5 interviews, students are ready to . . .
4. Analyze Their interviews
As students read through the theory of interview analysis, they plug in responses from their actual conversations with customers to discover how the theory is applied in the real world.
After having a thorough understanding of the problems their customers are trying to solve, students are ready for . . .
5. Solution Ideation
Using design thinking and creative problem-solving techniques, students ideate dozens of ways to resolve the problems they discovered during their customer interviews.
After which they’re ready for . . .
6. Financial Modeling
To understand how to build a profitable solution to the problem they’ve discovered, students use real-world data in ExEC’s Financial Projection Simulator; iterating their business model until they know it’s financially sustainable.
All of which contributes to their . . .
7. Business Model Canvas
Capturing all of the hypotheses they’ve validated (and the hypotheses still in need of validation) students edit the ExEC content to reflect their business model throughout the course.
All of which culminates in their . . .
8. Process Pitch
Best of all, while they’ve been updating their content to reflect their experience . . .
Students have simultaneously been developing their end-of-the-term pitch deck!
Every step of their journey – every failed experiment, every validated hypothesis, every business model iteration – is automatically recorded and turned into a “Process Pitch Deck” students can use to present their understanding of the business model validation process and how they applied it.
More important than the outcome of any single experiment, or grade on any one assignment, is helping students learn an entrepreneurial mindset – a process they can use repeatedly to solve problems of the people they want to serve.
See It In Action
Watch the video to see how even ExEC’s readings are interactive and experiential:
A Better Way to Teach Entrepreneurship
We all know . . .
Textbooks aren’t the best way to teach entrepreneurship.
Personalized, interactive content is what makes Netflix, Instagram, and every other platform our students use so engaging. The same principles work in educational content too.
