Building an engaging undergraduate Creativity and Innovation course can be challenging. We wanted to share a few tips and tricks we learned from surveying our community of nearly 10,000 entrepreneurship educators:
Invite your students to practice the skills necessary to identify and develop with creative ideas – like observation, problem-solving, customer interviewing, and prototyping.
Show your students how the concepts apply to their current existence.
Bring guest speakers and judges into the conversation so students learn from other perspectives.
This sample syllabus provides a way to help students develop the mindset and skillset to be confidently creative entrepreneurs!
Creativity Skills
Students taking a creativity and innovation course should gain transferable skills they can use to create significant value in any workplace! Students pursuing any career path will benefit from honing these skills – any organization constantly needs new and better ideas. This syllabus lays out a course that helps students recognize, develop, and act upon their creativity and innovative spirit.
Specifically, this course is structured as a journey that enables students to first find a problem worth solving, and then find a solution worth building. During the first phase as they find a problem worth solving, students develop a growth mindset, leverage failure, discover ideas that bring them meaning using the creative process, interview customers and validate problems they identify.
During the second phase of the course, once students identify a problem they find to solve, they turn their attention to finding a solution worth building. In this phase, students develop their creativity and design thinking skills as they develop solutions based on customers’ problems. They also learn to monetize solutions through financial modeling, learn to prototype solutions to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort, and run business model experiments. Finally, students share the story of the process they went through (in)validating their business model. In this end, they demonstrate they have acquired the entrepreneurial skills to find and test new opportunities.
Experiencing Creativity and Innovation
In this course, your students actively experience creating and capturing value. Through a variety of validated experiential learning techniques, students remain engaged and excited from day one until the last day of the course.
One example of our approach to experiential learning is our award-winning Lottery Ticket Dilemma exercise, during which students discover how important emotions are in the decision-making process and the importance of understanding and fulfilling other people’s emotional needs. Learning how to tap into and apply creativity and innovation is a very difficult journey.
We developed this creativity and innovation syllabus to help you enable your students to learn and practice the skills necessary to be a force of creativity and innovation in their chosen career path.
Get the Creativity & Innovation Sample Syllabus
We’ve created a detailed Creativity & Innovation sample syllabus that details the components of a full semester course.
Get the Sample Syllabus
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
We’ve spent years testing and iterating a structured set of comprehensive exercises that we know teach entrepreneurial skills in an engaging way – online or in-person.
Why waste your time trying to tie together a set of unrelated exercises you compile from around the web? Use a set of rigorous, cohesive lessons that will engage your students.
Use the “Best Entrepreneurship Curriculum Available”
Check out ExEC, engage your students, and give them access to the best tools available.
Mark McNees and the Florida State University entrepreneurship teaching team have been impressed by ExEC’s award-winning approach. So much so that they’ll be adopting it at both their Tallahassee and Pensacola campuses this Fall.
Dr. Samantha Fairclough of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln knew the way she previously taught entrepreneurship “isn’t working for me. The students hate it. I hate it. I don’t enjoy the book.” She decided to ditch all textbooks and was searching for readings and articles she could use instead when she found the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC). Read more about Samantha’s experience adopting ExEC in her classroom.
A Winning Approach
In addition to winning praise, ExEC exercises have won USASBE’s prestigious Experiential Entrepreneurship Exercises (3E) competition, the last two years in a row.
This competition is judged by entrepreneurship professors who know how hard it is to engage all students – and these exercises have won because they do precisely that.
Teaching experiential entrepreneurship courses is trending worldwide. We currently have 80+ universities teaching ExEC, including:
Virginia Tech
Penn State
Marquette University
TCU
Oklahoma State University
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
These diverse universities have adopted the ExEC curriculum into their classroom, and it can help your students too:
Kim Pichot of Andrews University met the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org team at the annual USASBE conference. She tried a few exercises with her students, and her classroom came alive! Kim was so happy with the experience she wanted to try the full ExEC curriculum. Read about her experience using ExEc in her university’s Interdisciplinary Innovation & Entrepreneurship Certificate (4 courses and a capstone ending with a demo day and real money).
Like hundreds of other entrepreneurship professors, Georgann Jouflas of Colorado Mesa University struggled to adapt the Lean Launchpad approach for her course. Rather than an accelerator cohort, she needed a comprehensive curriculum that was a better fit for students taking an entrepreneurship course. Learn how ExEC helped Georgann transform her students’ learning experience.
Online or In-Person
There are two versions of ExEC: one we’ve optimized for teaching in-person, and the other which we’ve optimized for teaching online and, especially relevant this Fall…
You can seamlessly transition between the two, even mid-term.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
We’ve spent years testing and iterating a structured set of comprehensive exercises that we know teach entrepreneurial skills in an engaging way – online or in-person.
Why waste your time trying to tie together a set of unrelated exercises you compile from around web? Use a set of rigorous, cohesive lessons that will engage your students.
Use the “Best Entrepreneurship Curriculum Available”
Check out ExEC, engage your students and give them access to the best tools available.
Teaching an online entrepreneurship class to students who are used to taking classes in-person can be particularly challenging:
Discussions can be lethargic
Students are sometimes unmotivated
You can end up teaching into the “void” with little input or interaction from your students
If you’ve run one of these lectures, you probably didn’t get much out of the experience and neither did your students.
To genuinely engage online students, rethink your course from top-to-bottom. You want to answer questions like, how do you…
Redesign your interactive exercises to work online?
Get students to reliably ask and answer questions?
Connect students to each other, and the material, when they’re socially isolated?
As you start your redesign, we wanted to share our online course syllabus in case it’s helpful.
A Blend of Sync and Async
No one likes teaching to the void (or being in the void).
What is the void? Have you ever used Zoom to teach to a bunch of black boxes? Or were your students’ cameras turned on but you consistently confronted with awkward silences and blank stares? Engagement is very difficult to maintain in an online course. Asynchronous is the most popular way to teach online, but an asynchronous learning environment alone can feel disconnecting to your students.
We wanted to avoid teaching to the void, and the disconnecting feelings it can create, so our syllabus is a combination of asynchronous activities students do individually with:
Interactive Synchronous Sessions. These experiential learning activities engage students and keep them motivated even when they’re learning remotely.
Reflection groups. This component of our online entrepreneurship course brings students together at regular intervals to share and process their experiences and processes. In these groups, students can reflect on the processes and the product of their journey through the course, helping them to learn from and teach each other, and also encouraging them to support each other thrive during the journey.
Check-ins. One of the biggest challenges experiential entrepreneurship classes face is that different teams progress at different speeds. Students who fall behind get discouraged when the class progresses to topics that are not yet relevant to them. Students who find success in making progress get bored if the class content stalls their progress. We also know that students can run into unique challenges in project-based classes, especially when they are online, and that students highly value time with instructors to help them overcome those challenges. One of the most successful remedies to both the problems outlined above is to provide students with differentiated learning experiences, via coaching/check-in sessions with teams. Every coaching session is an opportunity for students to measure the skills they’ve acquired in order to learn what to do next.
Skills-Based
An experiential entrepreneurship course, done well, helps students gain transferable skills they can use to create value for anyone or any organization in their professional and personal life. These skills are particularly important during times of uncertainty we are currently living through.
Find a Problem Worth Solving
Our curriculum has two phases of skill-building. The goal of Phase 1 is to find a problem worth solving. These are the skills taught in that phase:
Growth Mindset. This mindset is the belief a person has that they can learn more or be good at anything if they work hard and persevere. It is important to set the stage with this skill so students believe they can be good at anything, and that skill comes from practice.
Leveraging Failure. Failure is inevitable in the entrepreneurial process – we want students to build the skill set to take advantage of their failures to
Idea Generation. We don’t want your students to work on just any idea. Our syllabus highlights exercises and lesson plans that invite them to practice the skills necessary to discover ideas that bring them meaning. Once they have that idea, we guide them through identifying and actually locating their Early Adopters.
Customer Interviewing. The most critical skill entrepreneurs must learn is interviewing customers. Our exercises guide students through learning what to ask customers, iteratively practicing customer interviews, and analyzing interviews to guide their business model iteration.
Problem Validation. Students must decide whether they have validated a problem and whether they want to work on solving it or pivot to solve a different problem.
Find a Solution Worth Building
The goal of Phase 2 is to find a solution worth building. These are the skills taught in that phase:
Creativity & Design Thinking. These exercises enhance students’ brainstorming skills and how to develop solutions based on customers’ problems.
Financial Modeling. Successful entrepreneurship requires entrepreneurs to effectively monetize solutions. During this stage, students practice pricing and building a viable financial model.
Prototyping. Here we teach students to build new versions of their product that allows them to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Experiments. Running business model experiments is your students’ fastest path to success. Students learn to make small bets and test a number of different strategies until they find one that works.
Storytelling. In our curriculum, students don’t pitch their product/company. Instead, they share the story of the process they went through (in)validating their business model. In this way, they demonstrate they have acquired the entrepreneurial skills to find and test new opportunities.
Experiential
Your students should experience creating and capturing value, not passively learn about others who have. Experiential learning techniques are critical to any entrepreneurship course because they increase student engagement and excitement as they build knowledge by doing.
Using our new online syllabus gives you a way to engage and excite your students from the first through the last day with our innovative approach to experiential learning. One example of our approach to experiential learning is our award-winning Lottery Ticket Dilemma exercise.
Through this exercise, students will discover how important emotions are in the decision-making process and the importance of understanding and fulfilling other people’s emotional needs.
Specifically, students will experience:
Why the majority of businesses that start end in failure, & how to avoid those failures, & so students learn how to recognize and avoid those failures
Customers making decisions driven by their emotions, & so students learn how to uncover and leverage those emotions to create solutions customers want
Creating products customers want to purchase by understanding the emotional journey they want to take
Get the Online Entrepreneurship Sample Syllabus
We’ve created a detailed Online Entrepreneurship sample syllabus that details the components of a full semester course.
Get the Sample Syllabus
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.
Lecture Less & Coach More With the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum
Want to create engaging experiences for your entrepreneurship students? Check out the award-winning Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC). Request a preview of ExEC today and make next semester the most engaging semester of entrepreneurship yet! Our curriculum is full of experiential exercises that will make your students’ learning come alive.
Create Digital Worksheets with Google Docs and Slides
See the instructions below to learn how to use Google Docs and Slides to create your own digital worksheets that will engage students.
How to Create Digital Worksheets
In case you missed our previous post in this series, we talked about how combine your slides and webcam to recreate the effect below for live sessions.
We’ve fast-tracked the development of new online-ready exercises which you can use individually or as a set, called the ExEC Online: Express pack, available free through June!
Our final lesson, 60 Minute MVP, is ready!
Based on the extremely popular in-person version of this exercise, the online version of the 60 Minute MVP will have your students designing experiments to test demand just like they would if they weren’t under lockdown. They will:
Create a landing page
Add an explainer video and then
Start accepting pre-orders
The key to thriving in the face of high uncertainty and limited resources is efficient experimentation. With that in mind, this exercise will show your students how to quickly reduce the uncertainty of their business model by helping them launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to measure demand for their products/services.
Almost more important though…
This exercise is a ton of fun!
Students are excited because they’re doing something they didn’t know they had the skills to do, and it’s a great time for you because students are engaged in creating and sharing something with you and the rest of the class.
The ExEC Online: Express Pack is a collection of free, interactive, online entrepreneurship lessons available through the rest of this term that you can easily plug into your class individually or as a set.
In addition to the 60 Minute MVP lesson plan, we’re releasing three other exercises that are not only engaging, but particularly relevant in this time of uncertainty:
Problem-Inspired Idea Generation: We know customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems – and right now people’s problems have changed dramatically. This exercise will show your students a systematic way to identify new opportunities inspired by their customer’s real-world problems that is particularly helpful during times of disruption like we’re experiencing right now.
Financial Projection Simulator: With a global recession looming, it’s essential our students understand the elements of a robust financial model, and how to develop a sustainable one. This exercise makes finance approachable by turning what would normally be an overwhelming series of numbers, into a game-like experience that enables students to experiment with many different financial models.
How to Interview Customers on Lockdown: Now that business model assumptions have been flipped on their head, it’s more critical than ever that students learn how to effectively talk to customers to discover what problems they’re facing. A person with the skills to learn about how this new world will effect people individually, is a person that will thrive during this, and any future dramatic changes. This lesson will help students understand how to find customers to talk to, what questions to ask, and most importantly, why asking them will form the basis of a successful business model.
If you’re interested in using any of the exercises from the ExEC Online: Express Pack, please click here.
Due to the accelerated pace at which we’re releasing these lessons, the first iteration of the ExEC Online: Express Pack is designed for use in colleges/universities in the US and Canada. Future iterations will be accessible to students across a wider range of environments.
Regardless of who or where you teach, we welcome you to request access and we’ll notify you if, and as soon as, we’re able to bring your students on board!
Get All the ExEC Online: Express Pack Lesson Plans (Free)
Know an Entrepreneurship Instructor?
If you know anyone who these new lessons might help, please invite them to participate! You can:
Thank you for all the work you’re doing teaching and supporting young people during this challenging time – we’re grateful to have an opportunity to support you, and look forward to helping you however we can!
If you’re wondering whether your students are paying attention during your online lectures…they’re not.
“I’m waking up and then falling asleep again in Zoom classes.” – Xavier University Student
To be clear, this isn’t your fault or your students’ fault. The way screen sharing works on video conference platforms (where students see your slides fullscreen but only a tiny thumbnail of your webcam) means it’s near impossible for anyone to pay attention during a slide-based online lecture.
You can recreate this effect for your live (and recorded) lectures.
But you can easily change that. Using free, open source software, you can do what news and TV shows have done for decades:
Show facts and faces side-by-side.
When students can see your face, they can read your non-verbal cues to see how passionate you are and how important a subject is. Combine that with the fact that human faces are naturally engaging, and you can start lecturing online in a way that’s not only more interesting to your students, but more fun for you – at least it has been for me :).
For everything you need to combine your slides and webcam, open the free instructions below.
How to Combine your Slides and Webcam
We will show you, step-by-step, how to combine your slides with your webcam to create engaging experiences for your students when listening to your lectures online.
Step 1: Create Test Slides
Create slides that have a green screen built into them, which means you will add an area (your green screen) that you will eventually replace with a video output (your webcam). To do this, in PowerPoint:
Click “Insert” on the top menu
Click the “Shapes” option
Select the square shape option.
Draw a square box over half of a blank slide. Then fill that box with a bright green color, using RGB color codes 0 for Red, 255 for Green, and 0 for Blue. You then want to send your green screen to the back by right-clicking, and selecting “Save to Back” from the menu that pops up. Finally, move the text box on the slide to the other half of the slide so it does not overlap with the green screen half.
Keep the PowerPoint window open and move it to the left half of your screen.
Now download OBS Studio, which is free, open-source software that will enable the green screen effect. You’ll first want to set up your video output in OBS. To do this
Click on “File” in the top left corner
Click on “Settings” in that File menu
Click on “Video” in the menu on the left
In the top box labeled “Base (Canvas) Resolution”, make sure it is “1920 x 1080”
Now you want to add a new video source. In the “Sources” box at the bottom:
Click the + button
Click “Video capture device” from the menu that pops up
Name the device in the top line of the box that pops up (“Webcam” for instance)
Click “OK”
In the next pop-up box, select your webcam in the “Device” box
In the “Resolution/FPS Type” box, if your webcam allows output at different resolutions, you will want to select the same resolution you selected in the OBS video output (in this case, “1920 x 1080”)
Click “OK” and you should see your webcam output with a red box around it in the OBS window.
Next, you want to add a specific window to your OBS video output as a source. In this case, that window will be your PowerPoint slides. To do this, in PowerPoint:
Click on the “Slide Show” menu at the top
Click on the “Set Up Slide Show” menu
Click on the “Browsed by an individual (window)” radio button
Click “OK”
Start your slideshow
Next, you want to tell OBS to put the window showing your PowerPoint slide on top of the output from your webcam. To do this, in the Sources box of the OBS window:
Click the + button
Click “Window capture” from the drop-down menu
Name the output (maybe “Slides”)
Click “OK”
OBS will provide you with a set of windows you can potentially capture and lay over the webcam output. Click the drop-down menu labeled “Window” and select “PowerPoint Slideshow Presentation”
Click “OK”
You will now see the slideshow on top of your webcam output, with a red box around it. Drag the edges of the red box to make the slide show window the entire OBS output. You can then resize the original slide show (on the left half of your screen) to get rid of any black bars or elements around the edges you don’t want visible.
The next step is to get rid of the green screen. To do this:
In the OBS window, in the Sources box, right-click on the “Slides” source (or whatever you named your slides file)
Click “Filters” from the drop-down menu
Click the + on the bottom left of that window that opens
Click on “Color Key” from the drop-down menu
Name the Color Key in the box that pops up (for example, “Greenscreen”)
Click “OK”
You will see that the green part of the slideshow screen has been eliminated. If you see a slight green line between the two halves of the slides showing in the OBS window, you can slide the “Similarlity” slide to the right until that disappears. Click “Close” and you should see the right half of your slides visible and your webcam visible on the left half of the OBS window.
The next step is to move the webcam window. Click and drag the webcam output to the left until your face is positioned in the left half of the OBS window.
Now you can advance the PowerPoint slides by clicking on the Powerpoint window, and advancing the slides as you normally would. What you will see is in the OBS window, on the right side, the slides are advancing while the webcam output stays in place.
One advanced step is to create an audio source in OBS. To do this:
Click the + button in the Sources box at the bottom.
Click the “Audio Input Capture” in the drop-down menu
This will be to capture your microphone, so name it accordingly (i.e., “Microphone”)
Click “OK”
In the pop-up window, select whatever microphone you normally use, then click “OK”
This isn’t necessary to capture the slide and webcam videos in OBS. However, you also have the capability to record videos in OBS. If you wanted to record any lectures/lessons in OBS, now you would have the capability to capture the screen and your audio – you would just click the “Start Recording” button in the Controls box in the OBS window.
Step 3: Send Video Output
You now have OBS set up to produce the output you want. The next step is to send that output to the places you want it sent. You have two basic options to make this happen.
Option 1: Virtual Camera
This option includes a piece of software that takes your OBS output and makes it look like it’s a normal webcam to any video conferencing software (Zoom, Webex, etc.) To enable this, all you need to do is select OBS as the video output (instead of your normal webcam) within your video conferencing software. This is the optimal solution, but it doesn’t always work seamlessly with every combination of operating system and video conferencing software. For instance, this works great for Windows and Zoom, but at the time of this post, Macs don’t support virtual cameras by default, so this isn’t the optimal solution for Macs.
Windows:
Install the VirtualCam plugin from here (click the “Go to download” link on the right side of the page).
When the install is finished, in OBS, click “Tools” at the top
Click “VirtualCam” from the drop-down menu
Click “Auto Start” in the box that pops up
Slide the “Buffered frames” slide all the way to the left so it is at 0
Click “Start”
Macs: You can follow the instructions in the following video to connect OBS to broadcast on Zoom on a Mac:
Go to https://ndi.tv/tools/, scroll to the bottom of the page, and download the NDI Tools for Mac. You’ll have to provide your name and email address, and then download and install both the tools and the driver. Install the Driver download first. Then download the Tools files – when you open that folder, you will see multiple files. You want to install the “NewTekNDIVirtualInput.pkg” and the “NewTekNDIVideoMonitor.pkg” files.
Click Tools on the top bar, then click NDI Output Settings in the drop-down menu, check the box next to Main Output, then click OK
Open the NDI Virtual Input program
You will see NDI on the top bar to the right of “Help”. Click on that NDI, it should list your computer name with (OBS) after it. Click on that in the drop-down menu
Open the NDI NewTek Video Monitor program
Click File in the top bar, then click your computer from the drop-down menu, then click NDI Virtual Input from that drop-down menu
Open Zoom
Click on Settings (should be a small gear in the upper right, or you may have to click on your profile picture in the upper right, and then click on Settings in the menu that opens)
Select Video in the menu on the left side of the Settings box
In the drop-down menu for “Camera”, select NDI Video option
Make sure the “Mirror my video” box is checked
Select Audio in the menu of the left side of the Settings box
In the drop-down menu for Microphone, select NDI Audio
Uncheck the box for “Automatically adjust microphone volume”
Open a Zoom meeting and your video should be NDI Video, and your audio should be NDI Audio
This has now enabled your virtual camera to send the output to any service that wants to use your camera. To check whether this is working, open your video conferencing software (i.e., Zoom, Webex). Start a new meeting.
If your video conferencing window overlaps with your PowerPoint window, it will show up in your OBS output window. To prevent this, drag or shrink your video conferencing window so it does not overlap with your PowerPoint window, so in your OBS output window, all you see is your webcam output (your face) and the non-greenscreen part of your slides.
We recommend you downsize the OBS window and enlarge the video conferencing window. But when doing this, make sure nothing overlaps with the PowerPoint window.
Click the appropriate buttons to start your video in your video conferencing window. The camera you want to select in your video conferencing software is the “OBS Camera”. You should see the OBS output is now showing in the video conferencing window.
Option 2: Screen Sharing OBS Preview Window
In the OBS output window, right-click in the grey section to the left of your face. Select “Windowed Projector Preview” from the drop-down menu. What this gives you is a window that previews the OBS output. You can adjust that window size to eliminate any sort of black bars or “blank” space around the edges.
In your video conferencing window, instead of using “OBS Camera” as your video output, you can select “Screen Share” (in Zoom) and select the “Windowed Projector Preview” screen. You will see a green box around the “Windowed Project Preview” box, which means that is what is being sent out via the video conferencing Screen Share.
Step 4: Add Some Flair to your Slides
Just as you do in class, you want your presentations to be dynamic and engaging for your students. You can do this by adding small elements to your presentation.
You might add your school colors to the presentation. Use larger, more interesting fonts. You can also experiment with moving the greenscreen portion around on your slides to shift where your webcam output shows up. Maybe you add that to the bottom corner of your slides, and you can look up at the text as it flies into your slides.
You now have the capability to create dynamic, engaging presentations for your students. Experiment with what OBS can do to bring your lectures and presentations to life!
If you haven’t already registered, remember to join us at the:
Last week we opened registration to a virtual conference dedicated to engaging students online. So far, 350+ entrepreneurship educators have registered. We hope you join us!
An MBA entrepreneurship & innovation syllabus needs to map out a journey of skill-building, analysis, and experience that prepares students for careers as entrepreneurs, family-business owners, or intrapreneurs in corporate environments.
We built our MBA entrepreneurship & innovation syllabus by scaffolding deliberate practice on top of theory; this experience forces students to test the classroom learning by engaging real customers with real ideas and real solutions.
This sample syllabus lays out a skills-based, experiential journey during which students develop the mindset and skillset to create value as they launch innovative projects at work!
Entrepreneurial Skills at the MBA Level
An MBA entrepreneurship and innovation course, done well, helps students gain transferable skills they can use to create significant value in their workplace! These skills are particularly important as students learn their industry, work their way up the proverbial corporate ladder, and eventually perhaps launch a venture as they develop a network and expertise.
Through experiential exercises focused on leveraging failure and developing a growth mindset, students in classes using our MBA entrepreneurship & innovation syllabus develop resilience. Success on the first attempt is rare, so being able to fall and get back up will serve students well; having the resilience to push through obstacles is more important than developing good ideas. But good ideas count too!
Our syllabus equips students with the skills necessary to discover ideas that bring them meaning. Once they have that idea, we guide them through identifying, locating, and interviewing their Early Adopters. The most critical skill entrepreneurs must learn is interviewing customers. The exercises in our MBA entrepreneurship & innovation syllabus guide students through learning what to ask customers, iteratively practicing customer interviews, and analyzing interviews to guide their business model iteration.
Once students identify a problem they want to solve and potential customers who experience that problem, we turn them to finding a solution worth building. This is where our curriculum really shines for the MBA students! They practice design thinking as they develop solutions based on customers’ problems. Students learn to effectively monetize solutions by building a viable financial model. We then turn their focus to prototyping new versions of their product to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort, and to planning and running effective business model experiments. Overall, this journey provides students with a toolkit of skills that effectively and efficiently prepares students for success in the corporate or startup world.
Experiential Learning Matters
When building our MBA entrepreneurship & innovation syllabus, here are a few key things we learned from surveying our community of nearly 10,000 entrepreneurship educators:
MBA students want to know how to apply what they are learning in class; they want to practice skills. In this course, your students will practice skills such as problem-solving, customer interviewing, and prototyping that will help them create value in the organization they have or will found, or in the organization at which they are employed.
MBA students are likely to work a full-time job, and many have a variety of other family and community responsibilities beyond that. Take the opportunity right away to show these students that the skills and experiences they will be exposed to can create value in all those roles they juggle in their lives.
MBA students want their learning to be real. Make it real by adding “real” voices to your classroom – invite experienced entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs into your classroom as guest speakers and judges.
Get the MBA Entrepreneurship & Innovation Sample Syllabus
We’ve created a detailed MBA Entrepreneurship & Innovation sample syllabus that details the components of a full semester course.
Get the Sample Syllabus
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.
Want 15 Weeks of Lesson Plans?
If you are looking for a fully structured, experiential entrepreneurship curriculum, with a semesters worth of lesson plans that students love, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Let’s be honest. Teaching to a screen isn’t as fun as teaching in person. In person you can:
See if students are engaged
Have lively discussions
Connect with students
None of those are easy to do online, and because of it, teaching online can be more draining and less enjoyable.
Online Teaching Best Practices
Interested in learning how to teach online in a more engaging way? How about learning best practices in a live, “practice what we preach” environment with other entrepreneurship instructors from around the world?
Whether you’re new to online teaching and looking to improve your experience, or a pro willing to share your wisdom, please let us know if you’re interested in a virtual workshop dedicated to increasing engagement in online classes.
We’ve fast-tracked the development of new online-ready exercises which you can use individually or as a set, called the ExEC Online: Express pack, available free through June!
Based on our Customer Interviewing Cards, this exercise has been adapted to teach students how to interview customers under the unique circumstances that COVID-19 has presented. Hopefully, this lesson will only be applicable this term, but…
…it may be helpful in the Fall too!
This lesson is a fun way to teach your students:
Where to find customers to interview during a quarantine
We’ve made this exercise as easy to integrate as possible.
Interviewing Customers Step 1
Have your students watch this video:
If you’re teaching a synchronous class, feel free to skip showing the video and simply teach the principles yourself.
Step 2
Students complete the Digital Customer Interviewing Cards spreadsheet where they learn what their “objectives” (i.e. goals) for conducting customer interviews are, as well as the best and worst questions to ask during those interviews.
Here’s a quick look at what the spreadsheet looks like:
Step 3
Students get access to a robust interview script they can use for both remote, and in-person, problem discovery videos.
The ExEC Online: Express Pack is a collection of free, interactive, online entrepreneurship lessons available through the rest of this term that you can easily plug into your class individually or as a set.
In addition to the Customer Interview lesson plan, we’re releasing three other exercises that are not only engaging but particularly relevant in this time of uncertainty:
Problem-Inspired Idea Generation: We know customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems – and right now people’s problems have changed dramatically. This exercise will show your students a systematic way to identify new opportunities inspired by their customer’s real-world problems that are particularly helpful during times of disruption like we’re experiencing right now.
Financial Projection Simulator: With a global recession looming, it’s essential our students understand the elements of a robust financial model, and how to develop a sustainable one. This exercise makes finance approachable by turning what would normally be an overwhelming series of numbers, into a game-like experience that enables students to experiment with many different financial models.
60 Minute MVP: The key to thriving in the face of high uncertainty and limited resources is efficient experimentation. This exercise will show your students how to quickly launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to measure demand for their products/services. Plus, even outside the entrepreneurial context, in a future where online, remote-enabled work will likely be in demand, this is a great opportunity for students to learn how to build websites and create animated videos.
We’ll make each lesson plan available as soon as it’s finished. So if you’re interested in using any of the exercises from the ExEC Online: Express Pack, please click here.
Due to the accelerated pace we’re releasing these lessons, the first iteration of the ExEC Online: Express Pack is designed for use in colleges/universities in the US and Canada. Future iterations will be accessible to students across a wider range of environments.
Regardless of who or where you teach, we welcome you to request access and we’ll notify you if, and as soon as, we’re able to bring your students on board!
Get All the ExEC Online: Express Pack Lesson Plans (Free)
Know an Entrepreneurship Instructor?
If you know anyone who these new lessons might help, please invite them to participate! You can:
Thank you for all the work you’re doing, teaching and supporting young people during this challenging time – we’re grateful to have an opportunity to support you, and look forward to helping you however we can!
Social distancing appears to be our best bet (source)
Given the devastating effects of the virus, and the likelihood of returning, It’s hard to see how it makes sense for schools to invite students back into dorms and classrooms in Fall.
Even if we’re able to start classes in-person, we’ll all need plans to quickly transition our class online if necessary.
So how do you prep a class hoping it’ll be in-person, but assuming it’ll be online while knowing that…
Engagement is Harder Online
Let’s not kid ourselves…
Student engagement was a challenge before COVID-19.
But now that students are taking classes from home (i.e. bed), can attend class while watching Netflix, and know that we can’t be in every breakout room simultaneously, it’s an even bigger challenge.
Fortunately, there’s a way to prep for fall that will…
Engage Your Students: Online or In-Person
Lecture and quiz-based classes won’t cut it (they’re the antithesis of engagement), and it’s near impossible to structure a rigorous online class if you’re mixing and matching exercises from around the web.
If you want an engaging approach you can use online or in-person and don’t want to spend all summer building it.
Consider trying ExEC this Fall.
We’ve been developing ExEC, the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum, for the last 5 years and so far it’s…
There are two versions of ExEC: one we’ve optimized for teaching in-person, and the other which we’ve optimized for teaching online and, especially relevant this Fall…
You can seamlessly transition between the two, even mid-term.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
We’ve spent years testing and improving a structured set of exercises that we know teach entrepreneurial skills in an engaging way – online or in-person.
Don’t spend your summer recording lectures or compiling exercises from around the web. Make the most of your break, and your Fall, by using a set of rigorous, cohesive lessons your students will engage with.
This Fall, Try ExEC…
Whatever path you take this Fall, we wish you and your students the very best, and are happy to offer any help we can.
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