Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 2 – Apply

Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 2 – Apply

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

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

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

Fill-in-the-Blank BMCs

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

Business Model Canvas Osterwalder

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

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

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

Step 1: Think

Show students this Dollar Shave Club commercial:

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

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

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

  • Channel
  • Revenue Streams

Business Model Canvas Osterwalder

Step 2: Pair

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

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

Step 3: Share

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

Start filling in the boxes:

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

Step 4: Second Think-Pair-Share

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

  • Cost Structure
  • Key Activities
  • Key Resources
  • Key Partners

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

Start filling in the boxes:

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

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

Business Model Canvas Osterwalder

Fill-in-the-Blank Exercise: B2B

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

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

Step 5: Revenue & Relationships

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

  • Revenue Streams
  • Customer Relationship

Business Model Canvas Osterwalder

Step 6: Complete the Canvas

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

Business Model Canvas Osterwalder

Step 7: Design Your Own Canvas

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

Step 8: Get Feedback

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

Next Exercise: Prioritization

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

Using the Business Model Canvas to test your hypotheses.

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

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

Want More from Dr. Osterwalder?

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

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

Watch Alex Teach

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

Get the Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 2 Lesson Plan

We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 2” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.

Get the Lesson Plan

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

What’s Next?

In part 3 of this series, we explain how Dr. Osterwalder uses the BMC to teach students how to prioritize their business models’ riskiest assumptions.

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

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!

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:

  • Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 1. Check out the first post in this series, where we learn Dr. Osterwalder’s process of using matching to help students understand the Business Model Canvas.
  • 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.

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Check out our complete Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum
Learning the Business Model Canvas with Dr. Alex Osterwalder
Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 1 – Intro

Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 1 – Intro

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When we ran a workshop with Dr. Alex Osterwalder about how he teaches his Business Model Canvas, attendees were so excited about what he was sharing, 98% of them voted to change our schedule on the fly and extend his session from 60 to 90 minutes.

The exercises he was sharing were too engaging to let him stop.

In this article, the first in a 3-part series, we’ll structure Osterwalder’s exercises into easy-to-implement lesson plans you can use with your students.

Exercise #1: Business Model Matching

To introduce students to the 9 components of the BMC, Dr. Osterwalder starts by giving students a set of business model hypotheses and asking them to place each one in the appropriate box of the BMC.

Prepping Before Class

To make the most efficient use of class time, assign students to watch these videos before class:

Then you’ll want to print out the worksheets linked in the lesson plan below. Digital worksheets are also in the lesson plan if you’re teaching remotely.

Step 1: Fill the Boxes

Alex uses Airbnb in his first exercise because:

  1. Students are familiar with Airbnb
  2. As a two-sided marketplace, Airbnb is a great example of how one business model may need to fulfill the needs of multiple customer segments to be successful

Starting with the “Airbnb BMC: Travelers” worksheet, ask students to write each of the provided business model hypotheses in their appropriate boxes:

Copies of this worksheet are available in the lesson plan below.

We recommend each student complete this individually. While students will work in pairs for the next step, to help increase engagement and discussion, we like using Think. Pair. Share. with this type of exercise, which starts by having students work on their own.

Step 2: Pair

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

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

Step 3: Share

Reconvene the class. Go one by one through the boxes and ask a pair to share what they wrote for a particular box. Go through each of the boxes in this order:

  1. Customer Segments
  2. Value Proposition
  3. Channels
  4. Customer Relationship
  5. Revenue Streams
  6. Cost Structure
  7. Key Activities
  8. Key Resources
  9. Key Partners

Ask a new pair to report out what they wrote for each box and then ask the rest of the class if they had anything else different for that box. If student pairs disagree on what should be in a particular box, use that as an opportunity to increase discussion and, before you reveal the correct answer, have your students vote on which answer they think will be right.

Business Model Canvas for Airbnb Travelers

Slides with the correct answers, like the one above, are available in the lesson plan below.

Step 4: Repeat with Airbnb Hosts

Now ask students to fill out the AirBnB BMC: Hosts worksheet using the same Think-Pair-Share technique. 

Take time to explain that many businesses don’t have just one business model as a part of their success. Instead, many businesses, like Airbnb, are a multi-sided market. In this business model, the needs of two parties must be met.

You can highlight the popularity of this business model by pointing out that Uber, Doordash, Amazon all have this multi-sided market where the business has to keep multiple customers happy.

Business Model Canvas for Airbnb Hosts

Summary & Next Steps

Alex prefers simple matching exercises like these as a quick way to introduce the BMC. For more details on how to use it, including worksheets and slides, check out the free lesson plan below.

Next up, Alex provides students with BMCs that are partially filled out and asks students to fill in the rest – which we’ll detail in the next article in this series! We’ll share two more steps in the process Dr. Osterwalder uses to teach the business model canvas:

  • How to use fill in the blank exercises to help students create their own canvases
  • How to use prioritization exercises to teach how to use the BMC to test business model assumptions

Want More from Dr. Osterwalder?

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

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

Watch Alex Teach

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

Get the Teaching the Business Model Canvas Lesson Plan

We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 1” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.

Get the Lesson Plan

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

Read Part 2 In This Series of Teaching the Business Model Canvas

Check out the second post in this series, focused on using a fill-in-the-blank exercise to help students develop their own hypotheses.

What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share two more steps in the process Dr. Osterwalder uses to teach the business model canvas.

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

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!

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.

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Check out our complete Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum
Paper Airplane Storytelling

Paper Airplane Storytelling

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Storytelling is an important entrepreneurship skill. Whether pitching to investors, writing marketing copy, or leading teams…

Entrepreneurs must inspire others to take action.

In this exercise, students get to learn the importance of storytelling as they design and build one-of-a-kind paper aircraft and try to convince the rest of the class that their design will fly the best.

This exercise is based on the Kitty Hawk in the Classroom exercise originally published by Reginald Litz and colleagues in the International Review of Entrepreneurship and from the Airplane Contest Exercise published by Bradley George in Teaching Entrepreneurship: A Practice-Based Approach by Heidi Neck, Patricia Greene, and Candida Brush.

Overview

In this exercise students teams complete to see who can build, and pitch, the best performing paper airplane. Specifically, students will:

  1. Form teams
  2. Build the best paper airplanes they can
  3. Pitch their planes’ designs
  4. Votes on which team’s planes they think will perform the best
  5. Fly the planes
  6. Tally the scores for best planes and best pitches
  7. Reflective Discussion: What mattered more, the planes or the pitches?

Learning Objectives

  • Pitches are as important as the product. Students learn that they can create the greatest products in the world, but it won’t do any good unless people know about them. In this exercise, the same points are available for great pitches as there are for great planes, but students inevitably spend more time perfecting their planes than their pitches.
  • Pitches are prototypes too. Students will experiment with different plane designs throughout the exercise, but they’ll often neglect to iterate their pitch. Whether speaking to customers, investors, or team members, entrepreneurs should treat pitches like products – they need to be practiced, iterated, and improved upon to produce the best results.

Run this Exercise When…

…your students are just about to do their final pitch session of the class or in preparation for a pitch competition. Doing so will emphasize that your students should put more time energy into practicing and improve their pitches.

Want to try it?

Details are below.

Materials List

Provide students with the following supplies:

  • Paper for their aircraft – if you want to add an additional element of creativity to the exercise, you can provide a variety of colors, paper sizes and paper weights, i.e., notecards, card stock, paper plates, etc.
  • One dollar in your country’s coins for each group (provide a variety if possible)
  • Scotch tape
  • Rubber bands
  • Staples (and staplers)
  • Binder clips
  • Paper clips

Step 1: Identify a Leader

With students assembled in groups of 4-5, instruct each group to select a leader. Project the following image and tell them they have 2 minutes to identify a leader:

Step 2: The Task

Print out the following instructions and provide one copy to each group.

NOTE: Do not go over the instructions, and do not answer any clarifying questions students have. Answer any question with “You have your instructions.”

You are to design and create a paper aircraft capable of keeping one dollar of coins (or other local currency) aloft for as long (time) as possible while simultaneously transporting the coins as far (distance) as possible. The assignment is as follows:

  • Your final aircraft design must use the same number of pieces of paper as the number of people in your group (for example, a group of four must create an aircraft that uses four pieces of paper in its design)
  • Your plane must be designed to transport one U.S. dollar of coinage (or other local currency). You may choose the number and denomination of coins used; your only constant is that their total value must be exactly one dollar. 
  • You may not simply crumble paper into a ball; you must design an aerodynamically sensitive aircraft-based design, not a projectile
  • The only permissible additions are tape, paper clips, staples, rubber bands, and binder clips.
  • Your aircraft must leave the thrower’s hand and move 100% under its own power during the entire flight without touching another person
  • You will have two minutes to pitch your design to your classmates and convince them that your design will fly the furthest (distance) and will stay aloft the longest (time).
  • Your group’s performance is based on your aircraft’s performance (time and distance) and the number of votes your design gets from your classmates in each category (time and distance).

Step 3: The Exercise

Begin by explaining the voting rules. Each group is allowed one vote for only one team (not their own) on each dimension (time aloft and distance flown). Students can vote for different aircraft for each dimension.

Give students time to design their aircraft – roughly 10-15 minutes. Allow enough time for each group to pitch their aircraft for 1-2 minutes, for about 10 minutes for each group to fly their aircraft, and for about 15-20 minutes of debriefing).

Students will want to ask lots of questions, including where they will be throwing the aircraft, what you’re expecting in the pitch, the order of pitching, etc. Do not answer any questions – let the students know that you have provided all the instructions already and that they should get to work.

The Pitches and Voting

Have each team pitch their aircraft for 2 minutes max. Record each group’s vote on a chart on the board for the aircraft they think will perform best in each dimension (time and distance). Remind students that they cannot vote for their own design. 

The Flight

Take students to a predetermined location. This can be anywhere (we recommend somewhere close to your classroom to limit time on this step) – outdoors, a hallway, a gymnasium, in the classroom, etc. Each team gets one throw. Have a line delineated somehow that the thrower cannot cross, and record the time each aircraft stays aloft on a stopwatch. Have one or two trustworthy students mark and record where each aircraft first touches the ground.

The Results

Record the actual performance on the chart on the classroom board.

  • 1 point if the group voted for the aircraft that flew the furthest distance
  • 1 point if the group voted for the aircraft that stayed aloft the longest (time)
  • Rank aircraft based on distance flown (furthest distance gets the highest number)
  • Rank aircraft based on time aloft (longest time aloft gets the highest number)

The highest score wins. Let students know that nobody will lose points, that you added that element to increase the perceived risk and the intensity of the exercise. Reward each winning group member extra credit, and reward the winning group leader additional extra credit.

Debrief

There are several ways to debrief this activity, but one of the most powerful ones is for students to compare how they approached the iteration of their planes versus the iteration of their pitches.

Some interesting questions to reflect with students are:

  • How many points were available for the best performing product? How does that compare to the number of points available for the best pitch?
  • How many times do you think you tested and tweaked your plane’s designed? How does that compare to how the number of times you tested and tweaked your pitch?
  • If you wanted to test and iterate your pitch more, how could you have done it?
  • What was compelling about the pitches?
  • How did your group decide to vote? How important was the aircraft itself, and how important was the pitcher’s confidence and way of presenting the aircraft?
  • Why do you think others did or did not vote for your design?
  • How would you change your pitch if you had a chance to present your design again?
  • If your plane represents your product, and your pitch represents the way you market your product, communicate with your customers, talk with investors and collaborate with your teammates, how can you apply what you learned today to entrepreneurship at large?

As mentioned previously, students will often spend far more time on building their product than they will honing the stories they tell about it, which negatively affects their performance in this exercise as it does in the real world.

Other great debriefing questions include:

  • How did you view the coins? Did you see it as a negative constraint, or an opportunity to improve performance? Why?
  • How did you view the optional supplies? Did you see them as a negative constraint, or an opportunity to improve performance? Why?
  • How did you decide who your “thrower” would be.

These are great discussion questions because they offer a chance to talk about how successful entrepreneurs turn seemingly negative constraints into opportunities. Additionally, most teams will not experiment with different team members as the thrower. Instead, most tend to identify a student who is “good at throwing”, such as a baseball or softball player. This is a great opportunity to highlight the importance of prototyping everything related to execution.

Get the Paper Airplane Storytelling Lesson Plan

We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Paper Airplane Storytelling” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.

Get the Lesson Plan

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 and more tips and tricks to improve your evaluations.

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

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!

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.

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Check out our complete Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum
Financial modeling simulation
Financial Modeling Showdown: A Game to Teach the Basics of Entrepreneurial Finance

Financial Modeling Showdown: A Game to Teach the Basics of Entrepreneurial Finance

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If your students get bored (or anxious) when you start talking about finance, you know what’s waiting for you:

Disappointing and unrealistic financial projections.

Financial modeling is incredibly difficult to teach in an engaging way.  That’s why, in addition to our Financial Projection Simulator, we’ve developed a new game to play with your students that makes finance fun and memorable:

The game works in two phases:

  1. Theory: Introduce a lightly competitive game that teaches students the core elements of a robust financial model
  2. Practice: Using the same concepts they learned in the game, students create a financial spreadsheet for their own business model

Check out this quick demo / summary video of the Financial Modeling Showdown:

STEP 1: CREATE TEAMS

The first step in the Financial Modeling Showdown is to divide your class into two teams. Before revealing what choices students have for their teams, you’ll want to make big deal out of the fact that these two teams are mortal enemies and “disagree on just about everything” with the implication that the teams may be political in nature or represent major cultural differences.

Then you’ll tell your students to pick which team they morally align with most:

  • Team Pineapple: People who believe pineapple is a perfectly reasonable pizza topping
  • Team No Pineapple: People who believe pineapple has no business on pizza

Tell your students you’re going to play a game to determine if pizza topping preference is a predictor of entrepreneurial success.

This lighthearted way to create teams is quick, evenly distributes students, and sets a fun tone which is especially helpful for financial modeling exercises.

STEP 2: OPTIMIZE PROFITS

Tell your students they can put their pizza toppings preferences aside for now because they are all now inventors of a new product:

They’ve created a solar-powered cell phone charging case and their goal is to bring it to market in a way that will result in the most profitable financial model possible.

Students will then answer financial questions about their new product via a Google Forms survey (e.g. “How much will you charge for your product?”, “What do you want your salary to be?”, etc.).

STEP 3: THE WINNER IS…

As your students answer the financial questions, behind the scenes, the survey is automatically averaging the responses by team.

That means, as an instructor you’ll get a report that says (for example) on average:

  • Team Pineapple members want to charge $29.42
  • Team No Pineapple members want to charge $42.10

…and this is where the competition begins!

“It looks like Team No-Pineapple wants to charge more for their product. Of course, the more you charge, the more revenue you can make, so I’d say say they’re winning at this point. Next, let’s explore what effect conversion rates have on revenue, and we’ll see if Team No-Pineapple is still ahead.”

And just like that, you’re using financial vocabulary in a way that keeps students engaged because you’re using simple examples and leveraging a competitive game mechanic.

You’ll go through each of the major elements of a financial model this way, covering topics like:

  • Customer Lifetime Value
  • Customer Acquisition Costs
  • Salary, Taxes, and Benefits
  • Real Estate Costs
  • Unit economics
  • Etc.

And at the end, you’ll get to declare a “Winner.”

Or rather, you’ll get to demonstrate to students how hard entrepreneurship is to win. While one team will technical “do better” than their other team, it’s most likely that neither team will be profitable:

The game ends this way because we want to show students that:

Designing a financially sustainable business model takes iteration and experimentation.

Like everything in a business model, our initial assumptions are often wrong…and that’s why we do financial modeling!

Financial modeling is a tool to help them understand what assumptions they’re making about their business model that might set them up for failure.

If they begin modeling the finances for their own company, they’ll be able to see if they’re on the path to riches, or the path to ruin.

And this is the perfect segue for students to…

STEP 4: BUILD THEIR OWN MODELS

To apply the principles they learned playing the game, each student gets their own spreadsheet to model their business’s finances:

The results are financial models that are more realistic because students actually understand the concepts they’re based upon.

TRY IT THIS SEMESTER

If your students get overwhelmed by financial modeling, this exercise will help. Combining a competitive game with real-world financial modeling tools, students learn the core elements of a financial model in a way that keeps them engaged and results in realistic financial projections.

Get the Financial Modeling Showdown Lesson Plan

We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Financial Modeling Showdown” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.

Get the Lesson Plan

 

It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it.

What’s Next?

In an upcoming post, we will share exercises shared with our TeachingEntrepreneurship.org community by Business Model Canvas creator Dr. Alexander Osterwalder!

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

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!

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.

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Check out our complete Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum
Emotional intelligence ideation
Emotionally Intelligent Idea Generation

Emotionally Intelligent Idea Generation

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If you’re bored hearing the same student business ideas every term, this exercise is the first step to helping your students…

Ideate unique business models that are based on the real emotional needs of customers.

Developing unique, needs-based ideas is difficult for students.

Their lack of exposure to different customer segments often means we as educators hear the same business ideas over and over. Plus, like most first-time entrepreneurs, students tend to focus more on their own product ideas than the emotional needs of their customers. As a result, student business models are often repetitive, infeasible, or low impact.

This “Emotionally Intelligent Idea Generation” exercise, which we featured at the 2021 Summer Summit, starts students’ ideation efforts off by helping them hypothesize:

  1. The groups of people they want to serve
  2. The emotional needs of those people (i.e. problems they want to solve)

With this needs-based approach, we’ve seen a significant reduction in the number of students working on product-driven businesses (e.g. “alcohol delivery”, “t-shirt design”, “coffee shops”, etc.) and an increase in needs-based business (e.g. “decreasing the carbon footprint of the ‘fast fashion’ industry”, “reducing sexual harassment and assault in ride-sharing services”, “increasing access to outdoor recreation among lower SES communities”, etc.).

It’s worth noting, this exercise does not cover the entire idea generation process. Instead, this exercise is the first step in an opportunity assessment process that’s designed to ensure the business models students validate are built upon real customer needs. After this exercise, you’ll be ready to introduce your students to a range of opportunity identification and validation exercises (e.g. market-sizing, competitive analysis, customer interviews, etc.) to continue the idea assessment process.

Full Lesson Plan

Click here to skip to the full lesson plan, otherwise, you can get a summary of each of the steps below.

STEPS 1 & 2

First, to helps students explore the needs of a range of customers besides themselves, the exercise starts by asking students to simply list out who their closest friends and family members are:

Emotional intelligence ideation

STEPS 3 – 5

Students pick the 5 closest family members and friends they’d be excited to help solve a problem for. This step helps students find groups of people they’re excited to understand the needs of, which results in business ideas that are less about a product, and more about real-world customer desires.

Next, instructors invite their students to send a text message to those 5 people (during class) asking them what their biggest challenges are. This step is powerful because:

  1. It’s fun and engaging for students. Students are never encouraged to text their friends during class. This invitation to talk to friends during class is surprising and novel.
  2. It models the customer discovery process students will eventually do, helping students get more comfortable talking to people about their pains and gains.
  3. Focuses their idea generation on the needs of the people students want to serve (and away from a product students might want to build).

Finally, as their friends and family respond, students record the challenges they learn about in box #5:

Emotional intelligence ideation

STEPS 6 & 7

Students are invited to reflect on groups of people they personally belong to, or they are passionate about helping. This helps make the upcoming emotional needs hypothesis process (Step 8) more personal and relevant. For instance, a student could include sports teams, or school clubs, or community organizations. They could also include hobbies they have – maybe they play chess, or they knit or they love putt-putt.

Emotional intelligence ideation

STEP 8

In this step, students first pick the three groups they’d be most interested in resolving emotional needs for from all the groups of people they listed in steps in the previous steps.

The results are often something like, “people like my mom”, “students with ADHD”, “electric bike riders”, etc. which are all concrete groups of people students can start hypothesizing needs for.

To help with that process, students are prompted to explore the emotional needs of each segment by hypothesizing their:

  • Fears
  • Frustrations
  • Stresses
  • Loves
  • Etc.

We’ve found this step helps ensure student ideas are both more unique, and needs-based. By shifting students’ attention towards emotional needs (and away from products), the ideas tend to be more novel and less repetitive. And, by focusing on the emotional experience of the people they want to serve, the ideas students ultimately generate tend to be more grounded in customer needs.

Customer's life

STEP 9

Students then identify:

  • 2 of the emotional needs from Step 8 that they hypothesize are most emotionally intense for the members of that segment and
  • 2 of the emotional needs from Step 8 that they are most excited to resolve for the segment members.

Students then use a combination of back-of-the-napkin estimates of the market size, intensity of the emotional needs, and their personal passion for resolving those needs to prioritize the segments and needs they want to assess further.

Opportunity assessment

STEP 10

For the last step, students fill in the blanks to define two customers segment hypotheses they want to start a more in-depth assessment process on:

  • A primary segment hypothesis they think has the most potential
  • A backup segment they can pivot to if their primary hypothesis gets invalidated

Emotional intelligence summary

This emotionally intelligent framework for defining customer segments helps students shift their customer segment descriptions away from generic demographics (e.g. “women 18 – 24”) towards more useful, needs-based descriptions (e.g. “people with low self-esteem due to persistent acne”).

NEXT STEPS

After this exercise, you’ll have laid the groundwork to walk students through a wide range of assessment and validation processes for their hypotheses including:

  • Market-sizing
  • Competitive analysis
  • Customer discovery/interviews
  • Business model validation experiments

The result of which will be unique, and needs-based business models!

Get the Full “Emotionally Intelligent Idea Generation” Lesson Plan

We’ve created a free lesson plan for the “Emotionally Intelligent Idea Generation” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.

Get the Lesson Plan

 

Or Get the Lesson Plan, Slides, and a Video Walk-Through

We launched this exercise at the Summer 2021 Teaching Entrepreneurship Summit.  If you’d like the slides and recording where we launch:

  1. This lesson (Emotionally Intelligent Idea Generation)
  2. Making Finance Fun
  3. Improving Student Pitches

Click here to purchase the slides, recordings, and lesson plans for all three!

Lessons in your Inbox

In an upcoming post, we will share more lesson plans from our Summer Summit!

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journaling
Journaling: How to Improve Student Outcomes & Evaluations

Journaling: How to Improve Student Outcomes & Evaluations

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There’s a simple tool you can use to potentially improve your student evaluations while simultaneously…
Improving student outcomes.

Jay Markiewicz, Executive Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Virginia Commonwealth University, shared the tool he’s using to do just that:

Reflective student journaling.

Jay uses journaling not only to help students process the experiences he leads them through, he uses it to model customer interviewing and understand his effectiveness as an instructor, “I’m teaching entrepreneurship, so I might as well act like one. So I do customer interviews through journaling.”

Introducing Journaling

Jay requires students to purchase a journal of their choosing. He requires the journal to be paper-based – no electronic versions on a phone, iPad, computer, etc. Jay urges students to find a journal they like, that speaks to them because they need to have a relationship with it.

On the 1st or 2nd day of class, Jay spends 15 minutes explaining the concept of journaling and talking about why journaling (reflective thinking & learning) is important. He recommends sharing the following:

  • Students will journal 3 times each week outside of class for 15 minutes each time.
  • Students will journal during class time with 2-3 minutes at the beginning of class, and if time allows also a couple minutes at the end of class.
  • Jay will never, ever look at a journal; whatever the students write in it is a private relationship between them and their journal.
  • Jay will never ask students what is in their journals. Instead, he will ask students to volunteer what they are journaling about.
  • When journaling, if instead of class materials, students want to journal about something that’s really on their mind (an argument with a friend, an exam they performed poorly on, something happening in the world, etc.) they should feel free to journal about that.

Integrating Journaling into Class

Jay starts each class session by asking one or two students to share something that happened over the weekend. This quick minute allows students to feel ownership over the classroom.

Jay then integrates journaling into the class with a 2 or 3-minute reflection session. During this time, Jay asks questions that are good for students to process the information they’ve learned recently (and are good customer interviewing questions for him).

At the beginning of his course, Jay will often ask students to journal their answers to a question like:

  • “In your own words, what are some key points you learned in last class / last week.” It is critical to stress the “in your own words” part of that prompt. What you don’t want students to do is to grab their notes and regurgitate what you told them in previous classes. Jay recommends using this question early in the semester to get students feeling comfortable with journaling.

After a month of classes, Jay recommends asking more reflective questions about applied learning, such as:

  • “How has [specific content] showed up for you outside the classroom?” This allows Jay to understand how students are thinking about the content when outside the class. He hears things from students like “I noticed this commercial the other day, and noticed the framework of how they created the commercial and told the story” or “I read this article about this startup and was curious what kind of experiments they were running.”

Hearing this feedback shows Jay the knowledge is sinking in for students because they are applying it beyond the classroom.

  • Another great question to ask is “What is an insight you have about recent classes that you don’t think anyone else in the room has thought of.” Instead of Jay revisiting key insights or past content, students illustrate for each other how they’re understanding the content.

This peer sharing is a way for students to set aspirations for one another as they aspire to think of novel applications of the class concepts.

  • Another great question to ask is “How have you acted differently recently because of what we are learning in this class?” This question gets Jay’s students thinking about turning the content from the class into action during their daily life.

After the quick journaling session, Jay debriefs by asking “Who wants to tell me what they journaled about?” Ask for volunteers instead of calling on students, and guide the ensuing discussion around how students can apply what they are learning.

Journaling on Quizzes

Another way Jay uses journaling is as part of an exam, or you could use it as a stand-alone pop quiz. Jay asks students “what are four things you’ve learned in this class about anything” on an exam, and urges students “please raise the bar of your insights. In other words, what have been four insights you have had. Don’t answer this question with some basic facts like ‘I learned the steps of design thinking’.”

All students get full credit on that particular question. Jay told us:

This is a great way to understand what is resonating with my students and what are those impactful “SQUIRREL!” moments (i.e. tangents) that are happening that I want to repeat in subsequent semesters.

What Happens When Students Resist?

Jay has not had any verbal pushback from his students on journaling. In fact, his student feedback is that they find it a refreshing way to begin each class.

Some students will be resistant to journaling. Jay reported that sometimes on a “what are 4 things you learned” type question, he gets some version of “I can’t believe it, but the journaling has been really valuable.”

Journaling might be jarring to a student because it can be a very different classroom experience for them. Students are not just sitting there passively taking notes and texting friends, but are being invited to engage, participate, and be present in the experience.

Adapting Your Course Based On Journaling Learning

Jay uses the information he hears from students sharing their journaling to make real-time adjustments during the semester. If critical content isn’t sinking in with students, Jay takes the time to revisit it, but with a new spin to avoid sharing the same information, with the same examples.

If a student shares something after journaling that is a misunderstanding of critical material, that is a great outcome, because you can have a conversation right on the spot. Jay recommends inviting other students to respond if they have the same misunderstanding, and for those who do not, asking them to share their differing opinion so that the students are teaching one another and he’s their facilitator.

Your job is to guide the conversation as a peer-peer conversation so they are teaching each other and learning together. As Jay shared:

“Yes it takes class time, yes it can disrupt the timing of the day, but it is valuable to validate what students are learning and to correct misunderstandings.”

On the other end of the feedback spectrum, Jay reported that sometimes students will say something in journaling report-out that is absolutely brilliant. When that happens, Jay will grab the quote from the student and, when applicable, add it to his slides. Jay pulls up the actual slide and gets the student’s permission to type the quote in live, so students see it, and says to the student “Thank you for allowing me to use that, you are now part of this course going forward!” In that way, again…

Jay’s students (i.e. customers) shape his course.

Finally, Jay recommends keeping a document titled “Changes to make next semester.” Based on journaling & exam journaling questions, he adds notes to this document so when he is planning his course next semester, he can tweak where there are gaps in understanding.

The Results

The benefits of journaling have become clear to Jay, with students frequently writing in their course evaluations notes like:

  • “I would always get excited when we were asked to pull out our journals.”
  • “My favorite resource required was that I needed a journal for this class.”
  • “[I value] the act of journaling…it gives us the opportunity to reflect and share our personal thoughts in a private way that we only have to share about if we feel comfortable.”
  • “I really appreciated how you opened the course so that we all were the teachers and leaders in the course.”

In addition, Jay’s course evaluations have been 12% above norms due at least in part to his use of journaling.

Should you Try Journaling?

That depends on your goals. If student feedback isn’t valued by your institution or you don’t have the bandwidth to iterate your course, journaling won’t have much impact.

If, however, you:

  • Practice what you preach and always want to improve your course
  • Want to model customer-centric behavior for your students
  • Want to improve your student evaluations

Journaling is a simple, low-cost way to accomplish the above that can be applied in virtually any class.

If you give it a shot, please let us, and Jay, know!

What’s Next?

In an upcoming post, we will share new lesson plans from our Summer Summit!

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Improving Your (Inherited) Course

Improving Your (Inherited) Course

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Inheriting someone else’s entrepreneurship course often comes with challenges:

  • Topics are out of date and based on traditional long-form business plans, product-centric (as opposed to problems-centric) idea generation, and barely common topics today like Design Thinking, Business Models, Customer Interviews.
  • Not experiential instead relying on textbooks and lectures.
  • Based on quizzes and tests which can’t effectively assess skill development.

So how do you make it better? The two most common approaches:

  1. Iterate what’s already there
  2. Start fresh with a modern approach

Iterating a Course

If the bones are strong and the course is just slightly out of date, it’s relatively easy to:

  1. Identify the least engaging/most out-of-date lessons
  2. Replace those lessons with updated experiences
  3. Convert quizzes to reflections

The first step is to identify the weaknesses of the current course schedule (i.e. lessons that are the least engaging or most out of date). In particular, look for lessons on:

  • Business plan writing
  • Legal structure, IP, etc.
  • Product-centric (as opposed to problem-centric) idea generation
  • Finance (old versions of these lessons are often overwhelming and confusing for students)

While all of the above can be valuable, if your goal is to help your students develop entrepreneurial skills that will be applicable regardless of their career path, you can likely replace those lessons with more engaging experiences like:

  1. 60 Minute MVP. This exercise is engaging, fun, and fully immersive, teaching critical aspects of the entrepreneurial mindset while students build, and launch, a company in 60 minutes…with no technical expertise!
  2. Problem Generation vs Idea Generation. Through this exercise, students develop “better” ideas, meaning ideas that are creative, impactful, and feasible.
  3. Why Business Plans Don’t Work. This game helps students understand why business plans have fallen out of favor, and what data-driven entrepreneurs do instead, allowing you to introduce business model canvas and minimum viable products in a fun, gamified experience.
  4. Customer observations. During this exercise, students learn a technique to gain insight into the small details of a customer’s interaction with their environment that a customer may not think to express in interviews, thus understanding what a customer truly values.
  5. Financial Modeling Showdown. This exercise leads students through an experimentation process where they make different assumptions about their financial model, making entrepreneurial finance more accessible to all students through a game-like experience.

After injecting some energy into your class with new exercises, you can update your assessment strategy to assess skill development. Here we have two suggestions:

  1. Swap tests/quizzes for reflection assignments. Entrepreneurship students work developing a mindset and a set of skills. Quizzes cannot effectively assess either of those. Instead, the recommended tools for assessing entrepreneurship students are reflective assignments. Video reflections provide a fast, and rigorous way to assess entrepreneurship students, so we provide a demo of our video reflection and a rubric to assess video reflection submissions.
  2. Update the final class pitch. Too many entrepreneurship courses end with students pitching unrealistic ideas, or pitching ideas they don’t believe in, and a random variety of “judges” predicting the potential of these “bad” ideas. Instead, you can optimize the ineffective pitch day by focusing on skill-building and engaging all students if you shift away from Shark Tank pitches to what we call “process pitches.”

Those tweaks can go a long way if your class has a solid overall structure.

If, however, your course is lacking structure, or you’d like a cohesive, engaging experience for your students, consider a…

Fresh Start with a Modern Curriculum

If you want a structured, engaging entrepreneurship curriculum that focuses on customer interviews, design thinking, and business models:

Check out the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum.

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Used at over 150 colleges and universities, including…

ExEC makes prepping a structured course easy with:

  • LMS Integration (Canvas, D2L/Brightspace, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.)
  • Online, in-person, and hybrid versions
  • 8, 10, 12, and 15-week schedules
  • Rubrics

If you haven’t already, definitely…

Whether you iterate your course, or start fresh, making your course as experiential and skill-based as possible is the key to keeping your students engaged.

What’s Next?

In an upcoming post, we will share an approach to improving your student evaluations!

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Semester Experiential entrepreneurship education schedule
Last Call For ExEC This Fall

Last Call For ExEC This Fall

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If you’re considering ExEC’s structured exercises in Fall…

This is your last call!

We want your prep to be as easy as possible, so we’d like to get you set up by August _____.

Semester Experiential entrepreneurship education schedule

ExEC Engages Students

Whether you are teaching classes in-person, online, or hybrid, there’s a version of the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) that will engage and motivate your students.

For more details on this award-winning curriculum …

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Alex Osterwalder Teaching Business Model Canvas Workshop August 3rd
Teach The Business Model Canvas with ExEC

Teach The Business Model Canvas with ExEC

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On Aug. 3rd Dr. Alex Osterwalder will join our community to teach us how we can use the Business Model Canvas (BMC) in our classrooms!

Register Here

This free session will start with Dr. Osterwalder walking you through a number of Business Model Canvas exercises of varying difficulty and engagement. Then he’ll introduce exercises to teach the mechanics of experimentation.

Alex Osterwalder Teaching Business Model Canvas Workshop August 3rd

**NOTE: We will record the session for anyone who cannot make it, so please register even if you can’t attend so you will have access to the recording**

For more on Dr. Osterwalder, check out his company Strategyzer and his suite of books being used in entrepreneurship classrooms around the world.

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Sample ExEC Syllabus
1 Week Left to Adopt ExEC

1 Week Left to Adopt ExEC

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Fall is just around the corner!

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

Engage Your Students This Fall

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

Sample ExEC Syllabus

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 Fall, request a full preview of ExEC today!

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