It’s not because they think the business plans are the best tool for building a business.
We asked the Teaching Entrepreneurship community what tools they teach and many of the instructors we surveyed teach business plans because it’s a course requirement or because they believe it’s “standard practice” outside academia.
Our research appears to contradict the notion that business plans are standard practice as a majority (57%) of instructors outside academia don’t teach business plans at all.
In fact, across the nearly 300 instructors we surveyed, only 8% teach the business plan exclusively.
Compare that to the 88% of instructors who teach one of the “canvases” (e.g. Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and/or Value Proposition Canvas) and it’s clear business plans are no longer the de facto standard.
Why Do Teachers Love the Business Plan?
The few respondents teaching only the business plan cited many reasons for preferring this tool. The most commons reasons are:
It is a comprehensive tool
It is necessary for some funding sources like bank loans
It is required by standards in the respondent’s particular context
But the vast majority of teachers don’t feel that way – across all teacher populations we surveyed (K-12 and higher ed, academic and non-academic, from the US and abroad), only 8% teach only the business plan.
For instructors and course coordinators who still teach the business plan:
Requirements that business plans be taught because they are seen as a standard entrepreneurial practice should be reconsidered.
While some instructors see benefits in teaching business plans, and they may be important to teach in some circumstances, they are taught by a minority of instructors both inside and outside academia and should no longer be considered the de facto standard for describing businesses.
What Entrepreneurship Tools Do Teachers Use?
“Canvases” (Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and/or Value Proposition Canvas) have replaced the business plan as the most popular teaching tool.
As we mentioned earlier, 88% of instructors we surveyed teach with some version of a Canvas, and 50% teach the Business Model Canvas.
Why Do Teachers Love the Canvas?
Our respondents cited many reasons for preferring the Business Model Canvas. The most common reasons are:
It is simple and user friendly. Specifically, some teachers noted the BMC is a way to engage non-business students that is not intimidating.
It forces students to focus on customer development and experimentation as they pursue product-market fit.
It is the dominant tool used in “the real world.”
Because of the dominance of the BMC in entrepreneurship education, we engaged Dr. Alexander Osterwalder in a series of posts to share how he teaches this tool.
How Do The Entrepreneurship Tools You Use Compare To Your Peers?
Nearly 80% of K-12 teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
Nearly 90% of academic teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
Nearly 90% of US-based teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
Other Popular Entrepreneurship Education Tools
AI Tools
To see the full list of additional teaching tools, please enter your email below.
It is not surprising many respondents mentioned AI as a favorite tool. In previous posts, we explored some of the challenges of using AI in academia, and also some benefits. For instance, in a lesson plan we developed, students use ChatGPT as a cofounder and develop a business model and an MVP to test that business model.
Stay tuned for an exciting announcement about our upcoming
Design Thinking
Many respondents mentioned design thinking as a favorite tool. Using this process, students create ideas that are exciting to customers and that they want to pay for because the product actually solves their real problems.
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a technique for evaluating and making choices about an organization, products/services, or specific projects. Founders and small business owners use it to make smart, informed business decisions because it aids in understanding a company’s position within their market or industry and knowing how and where it can grow.
Mindmapping
A mind map is a graphic representation of thoughts, ideas, concepts and notes. This tool allows your students to visually organize information and see relationships among parts of the whole.
Because mind maps offer a visual means to identify connections, it is an excellent tool for idea brainstorming and for competitive analysis. For instance, students can identify similar products/services and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses relative to the student’s product/service.
If you are interested in collaborating on research with this data, please email [email protected] and let us know!
In future posts we will share more about our upcoming TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Summer Summit and about tools and methods to increase student engagement.
Subscribe here to get info delivered in your inbox.
Dr. Alex Osterwalder, one of the creators of the Business Model Canvas (BMC), uses a 3-step process to teach it to students. This article outlines his third step:
How to test a business model canvas.
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 the second step, Alex helps students learn to write their hypotheses by asking students to complete partially finished BMCs.
In this third step, Alex helps students learn how to use the Business Model Canvas as a tool to prioritize their business models’ riskiest assumptions so they can design tests to validate them.
Prioritization Exercise
It’s critical to teach this prioritization step because it’s one of the major benefits of teaching the BMC over traditional business plans. Once entrepreneurs have a prioritized list of their riskiest assumptions, they can design experiments to test each of those assumptions in order of their prioritized risk.
To introduce prioritization, Alex presents an example from one of Steve Blank‘s classes that you’re welcome to use as well. Steve’s students were working on a company called Ceres, where they wanted to fly drones over farmland to capture images and generate data to help farmers fight drought, disease, and pests.
To help your students visualize what that means in practical terms, you can show them this video:
Step 1: Technical Hypotheses
Show your students the following BMC for Ceres and ask them to brainstorm what technological challenges have to be addressed for the business model to work.
Your students might share similar thoughts as Steve’s students had, such as:
Demonstrate they can build drones
Develop software to extract data from images the drones collect
Present data to farmers in a way they could use it
As with the previous exercises in this series, we recommend using the Think. Pair. Share. technique where students first reflect on the question individually, then share their thoughts with a partner, and finally, you facilitate a discussion with the entire class. This approach enables a lot more interaction and discussion than immediately starting with a class-wide discussion.
Step 2: Business Hypotheses
Next up, have your students brainstorm the non-technical challenges Ceres will have to tackle for their business model to be successful.
Your students may come up with challenges like:
Farmers want data to treat their fields
Farmers want to forecast their production
Farmers have a budget for our value proposition
Farmers are willing to pay for data
Farmers struggle with diseases and drought
Local water utilities and fertilizer/pesticide producers are interested in partnering
Step 3: Prioritizing Hypotheses
Now ask “which of these hypotheses should Ceres test first?” In other words, when there are so many assumptions about a business model, how do you prioritize which ones to test first?
Ask your students which 3 of the 9 hypotheses listed above would they test first. This is another great opportunity to utilize the Think. Pair. Share. technique.
After sharing, tell students that when we talk about the riskiest hypothesis of a business model, we say…
The riskiest assumption of a business model is the one that is most likely to kill the business.
With that in mind, it might make sense that the Ceres students chose the following as their riskiest assumptions:
Demonstrate they can build drones
Develop software to extract data from images the drones collect
Present data to farmers in a way they could use it
You could imagine the Ceres students saying, “Without drones and the data they collect, we have no business!” What they and most entrepreneurs don’t realize is, as Alex puts it, “Desirability” hypotheses are almost universally riskier than “Feasibility” hypotheses.
It turns out that “Feasibility” hypotheses (i.e., “Can we build it?”) are nowhere near as difficult to validate as “Desirability” hypotheses. That’s because…
A problem without a solution is a matter of time. A solution without a problem is a waste of time.
Put another way, if you find out someone has a problem, there are a myriad of ways you can try and solve that problem. But, if you have a solution to a problem, but no one actually has or cares about solving that problem, the solution is useless and all the time spent building it was wasted.
So Ceres’ riskiest assumption isn’t that they can build a drone; their riskiest assumption is that farmers have problems that can be solved with drones.
Their actual riskiest assumptions all fall under the “Desirability” category:
Farmers struggle with diseases and drought
Farmers are willing to pay for data
Local water utilities and fertilizer/pesticide producers are interested in partnering
Once the desirability and viability hypotheses have been validated, the riskiest assumptions fall within the feasibility category.
To demonstrate this point, tell your students about the…
Step 4: Ceres Case Study Update
What happened, in reality, is that Ceres students started interviewing farmers, and farmers asked:
Why would you build drones to take pictures when we already fly planes over our fields to spray for fertilizers and pesticides?
Farmers told students they could just attach a camera to the planes that are already flying over the fields to capture images. If students had built their drones first and talked to customers second, they would have invested millions of dollars building unnecessary technology.
Instead, because the Ceres team validated their desirability hypotheses before their feasibility hypotheses, they were able to simplify their business model and lower costs for themselves and their customers by eliminating the need for developing drones entirely.
As a result, the Ceres team was able to scale its business model to secure significant funding and recognition for its innovativeness.
The lesson for your students:
Always test desirability before feasibility.
Step 5: Homework
At this point, students have experience with the Business Model Canvas that they’re ready to apply what they’ve learned.
For homework, assign students to fill in the BMC for a venture they’d like to validate, as well as identify the 3 riskiest hypotheses of their business model.
The Business Model Canvas and variations of it (e.g. Lean Canvas, Mission Model Canvas, etc.) are some of the most popular and ubiquitous tools in use. Dr. Alex Osterwalder’s use of matching, fill-in-the-blank, and prioritization exercises is intentional, and helps educators avoid some of the common pitfalls when teaching the BMC, namely:
disengaging learners with lectured-based instruction,
overwhelming learners with insufficient structure, and
not adequately addressing how to use the BMC as a hypothesis prioritization and validation tool
In this 3-article series, we shared the steps Alex uses to teach this important tool for entrepreneurship educators.
In the first step, 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 the second step, Alex helps students learn to write their hypotheses by asking students to complete partially finished BMCs.
In this third step, Alex helps students learn how to use the BMC to prioritize the riskiest assumptions so they can design tests to validate them.
Want More from Dr. Osterwalder?
If you like this exercise, Alex also has two new books that are great resources for the classroom:
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 3 Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 3” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers so share it with another instructor you know.
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.
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:
Prototyping and Pitching. Storytelling is an important entrepreneurship skill. In this experiential exercise, students learn they must inspire others to take action.
Financial Modeling Showdown. If your students get overwhelmed by financial modeling, try this exercise that combines a competitive game with real-world financial modeling tools.
Improve Student Evaluations and Outcomes. 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 the Business Model Canvas: Part 2 – Apply
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.
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:
Started selling online, with no physical stores
They acquired customers through viral videos
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
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.
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
Step 6: Complete the Canvas
Repeating the same process as before, ask students to complete the rest of Salesforce’s BMC:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 1 – Intro
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:
Students are familiar with Airbnb
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:
Customer Segments
Value Proposition
Channels
Customer Relationship
Revenue Streams
Cost Structure
Key Activities
Key Resources
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
So consider running this either at the beginning of your course when you’re introducing the canvas, or toward the end of your course when you’re introducing MVPs.
The Game
Step 1: Students Play Innovator’s Plinko
You start the lesson with each student playing Innovation Plinko, courtesy of the amazing team at Kromatic!
As students drop each of their Plinko chips, each of which represents a new business idea, they quickly realize that:
Most new business ideas fail.
Step 2: Introduce Experimentation
With that context, students discover what’s needed is a way to “test” each idea to determine which ones are most likely to pay off:
As students play this game they discover that…
The earlier they test their business ideas, the better their outcome.
Step 3: Tinder is Testing (for Dating)
While most students have no prior entrepreneurial experience, virtually all of them have dating experience. That’s helpful because Tinder is a great metaphor:
Entrepreneurs are “searching” for business models like single people are “searching” for partners.
Tools like Tinder help you weed out bad relationship matches quickly:
Unfortunately, Business Plans don’t encourage students to “swipe” through bad ideas like Tinder does. Which is exactly…
Step 4: Why Business Plans Fail
Writing traditional business plans are like writing fairy tales: it’s fun and they always have a happy ending, but they’re divorced from reality.
Any potential benefits from the “planning” process are dwarfed by the fact that:
Business plans encourage you to fall in love with a fantasy.
Business plans take a significant amount of time to write. Google can’t answer the real questions of market size, sales channels, or value proposition.
Only customers know the answers to those questions.
The more time spent theorizing and “planning” a business, the less time learning what customers’ real needs are, and the best way to address them.
Step 5: A Better Way
Here re-introduce that Tinder analogy. Let students know there is a Tinder for entrepreneurship, a more efficient way to find a lasting business model. When looking for a business model in which we want to invest our time, energy, and money, we only want to find the best fit for an idea. We want to treat looking for a business model like we treat looking for a significant other.
Instead of thinking of business ideas as looking for “the one”, we should look at it more like dating. On Tinder, a person is not looking at every single profile thinking “this could be the one!” Instead, what people do is look for red flags on every single profile, and for the vast majority of profiles, people will swipe left because they sense some sort of red flag indicating that person isn’t “the one”.
Make the point that when looking for ideas and business models, what we are looking for are red flags and reasons not to pursue it; we are not looking to get married to every business idea we think of.
Just like in dating, with our ideas, we want to test the waters. We look at someone’s profile, and if it looks good, we send a message. If they do something that raises a red flag (sending graphic photos or using offensive language), we stop.
The same thing goes with working on ideas and business models. We want to test the waters as soon as possible, and immediately stop as soon as we sense red flags, then modify things or somehow pivot.
The idea to drill home with students is to save their time and energy and money for the best of the best! The faster we can eliminate the bad ideas, the sooner we can find the good ones, so we want to stop and assess ideas as soon and as often as possible.
Business Models Are a Better Alternative
Explain to students that instead of working on business plans, they want to approach ideas and business models as experiments. In this approach, they have the opportunity to stop pursuing any idea at any given time if they sense a red flag, whether it’s at the very beginning, or further along. Show students a Business Model Canvas and explain that we use this tool instead of a business plan because it allows us to quickly hypothesize and experiment with our ideas and our business model.
This tool lets us quickly write up all the potential red flags we are worried about and want to test in our business model and allows us to make a small investment in one element at a time (like sending a quick message on Tinder to see if the person responds appropriately).
The Full Lesson Plan
If you’re looking for a way to engage students while you introduce:
Business Model Canvas and
Minimum Viable Products
…or you just want to play Entrepreneurial Plinko…
Get the “Why Business Plans Suck: The Game” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Why Business Plans Suck: The Game” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it.
All we ask is that you leave us some feedback on it in the comments below so we can improve it!
What’s Next?
In an upcoming post, we will share a companion exercise to the “How to Build a (No Code) App” exercise. This will help students understand why it is critical to engage customers prior to launching!
Subscribe here to get our next classroom resource in your inbox.
Experiential teaching is arguably the best way to engage entrepreneurship students. At the same time, classes without textbooks are notoriously difficult when it comes to assessment:
No multiple choice tests means objective grades are hard to come by
Team & project based-grades cause stress and conflict between students
Grading written reflections is subjective, and doesn’t provide the “grade defensibility” more traditional assignments do
Grade distributions can be difficult to achieve when the focus is on skills as opposed to scores
With the new academic year upon us, we wanted to share our strategies in time for you to incorporate them.
ExEC’s Assessment Philosophy
Assess Process. Not Progress.
What that Means
Ensuring students understand how to create businesses that fulfill customers’ emotional needs (e.g. solve problems, achieve desires, etc.) via an iterative process consisting of devising and executing experiments to validate assumptions.
As teachers, we have very limited time with students – one, maybe two terms. The businesses they build during their time in school are not going to be their best/last chance at success. Students’ time with us is best spent developing a mindset that prepares them for creating future ventures.
Why We Believe it
A focus on process encourages:
Skill development (not syllabus gaming)
Meaningful learning about the market, customers, problems, etc. (not inflating/falsifying numbers/results)
An experimental entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial mindset they can leverage regardless of where their career takes them
How We Achieve it
Evaluating students’ understanding and implementation of the business model validation process through:
Out-of-class exercises
Written reflections
Presentations
Small-group meetings with instructors
What Not To Assess:
Achieving “Product-Market Fit” or “Problem Validation.” Often times the best outcomes for business model experiments is determining the model isn’t worth pursuing in its current design. Students should be rewarded, not penalized, for invalidating their assumptions, even if it means they don’t validate a problem during their interviews, or generate revenue during their demand tests.
Number of interviews conducted. While students conducting very few interviews (e.g. < 5) aren’t demonstrating an understanding of the business model validation process, a high number of interviews doesn’t correlate to high comprehension of the process. In fact, in many cases, not being able to find customers to interview is a great way to invalidate assumptions. Avoid assessing students on the number of interviews they conduct, and instead, focus on the process they used to try to acquire their interviews, what they learned during their interviews, and how that informed their future hypotheses.
Number of paying customers or revenue generated. Putting emphasis here will incentivize students to alter the results of their experiments. Instead, we want to encourage students to run objective experiments, and report out on their actual results, even, and especially, if that means their experiments “fail.” Emphasizing their process, over their progress, will decrease students’ fear of failure, and encourage a more risk-tolerant and innovative mindset.
The originality or innovativeness of the idea. Assessing originality and innovativeness can be extremely subjective. Moreover, the focus of ExEC is to show students a process they can use to create successful businesses that solve problems. The solutions do not necessarily have to be original or innovative to solve a problem or teach students a process.
What To Assess:
Student’s ability to:
Effectively recruit prospective customers for business model validation experiments.
Design and execute business model validation experiments like demand testing, customer interviewing, etc.
Conduct interviews to understand the emotional perspective of their customers.
Use information from business validation experiments to devise and iterate possible solutions to their customer’s problems.
Assess the financial viability of their solution.
Describe their validation journey and understanding of the process.
An overview on how we implement our philosophy is below.
Assignments and Rubrics Assessment
There are four steps to the ExEC assessment model, all of which are graded on the following scale:
Full Credit: means the student demonstrates a consistent and complete understanding of, and ability to apply, the validation principles underlying the assignment.
Partial Credit: is given when students demonstrate an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the underlying principles, or difficulty applying the principles.
No Credit: is given when students demonstrate a lack of willingness to learn, or apply, the underlying principles of the exercise.
Instructors are given the freedom to implement this scale as they see fit (e.g. a points system, A-F grades, etc.). Details on the specific steps of ExEC’s assessment model below:
Step 1: Exercises
Written assignments students complete outside of class that help them design and execute their business model validation experiments.
There are 29 exercises students do outside of class during a typical 15-week ExEC course. So as to not overwhelm our instructors, we recommend they assess most exercises with a simple complete/incomplete scale, based on good faith effort. We do however call out four exercises that are worth assessing thoroughly:
Business Plans vs Business Experiments: A written, or recorded, reflection on their Tower Building Challenge, where students educate a fictitious friend about the dangers of hidden assumptions and the power of experimentation and iteration. Why we grade this thoroughly:
The first exercise of the class.
Demonstrates students’ understanding of the pros and cons of business planning versus business model validation.
Underscores the importance of experimentation, which they will be assessed on repeatedly throughout the class.
Your Early Adopters: This exercise demonstrates the difference between Early Adopters, Early Majority, et al., and helps students identify who they should conduct problem interviews to increase the efficacy of their outreach. Why grade this thoroughly:
The basis for student interviews. If they don’t get this right, much of the rest of their exercises will falter.
Will highlight the importance of empathizing with customers, which they will be assessed over and over throughout the course.
Key principles of entrepreneurship.
Customer Interview Analysis & Interview Transcripts: In these exercises, students record and transcribe (via automated transcription tools) each of their customer interviews, and build affinity maps to highlight the patterns in their qualitative data. Why we grade this thoroughly:
Demonstrates students’ ability to conduct customer interviews.
Demonstrates students’ ability to empathize with customers.
Demonstrates students’ ability to do qualitative analysis.
Will determine future experiments.
Experiment Design Template: This exercise asks students to design an experiment to test their Business Model’s riskiest assumption, including how they’ll execute the experiment, how long it will take to execute, what the success and failure metrics are, and what their next steps are based on the potential outcomes of the experiment. Why we grade this thoroughly:
Demonstrates students’ ability to identify the riskiest assumptions of their business model.
Demonstrates students’ understanding of effective success metric definition.
Demonstrates students’ ability to design and execute experiments that test falsifiable hypotheses.
Step 2: Validation Check-Ins
Short, 10 minute meetings between our instructors and individual teams where instructors assess a team’s understanding and application of the validation process and help them overcome specific challenges they’re facing designing/executing their experiments.
Each check-in’s assessment focuses on four elements:
Criteria
Preparedness: students completed and brought all the required materials.
Empathy: students were able to understand the emotions driving their customers’ pains/gains, and utilize that understanding to effectively resolve their customers’ needs.
Experimentation: students effectively hypothesized falsifiable assumption and design, and implement experiments to test those assumptions.
Overall Process Execution: students effectively demonstrates an awareness of why they are taking a given step in the validation process, understand how it will lead to their next validation step, and execute those steps effectively
Step 3: Business Model Journal
A collection of Business Model Canvas iterations, and written reflections, detailing each student’s business model assumptions, experiments, and learnings throughout the course.
Unlike courses that produce a single Business Model Canvas at the end, ExEC students iterate their canvas upwards of 10 times throughout a course based on the experiments they run. Each iteration of their canvas is accompanied by a short reflection describing:
What hypothesis the students tested this week
The experiment they ran to test the hypothesis
The results of that experiment
How those results influence the experiment they’ll run next
Instructors can use this written history of each student’s validation journey, to assess how well the student understands and applies the validation process individually – independently of the contributions of their teammates.
Step 4: Process Pitch
A presentation of each team’s validation journey during the course, including all of their (in)validated assumptions, emphasizing their ability to execute the validation process, more than the final outcome of the business.
Students wrap up the ExEC course with a pitch, but not a traditional product-centric, Shark Tank-style pitch; this pitch is process-centric.
More important than the outcome of any single experiment, or grade on any one assignment, is helping students learn an entrepreneurial mindset – a process they can use to repeatedly use to solve problems of the people they want to serve.
This pitch not only helps instructors assess how well students understand the validation process, it will reinforcement one more time, the most important principles of that process:
Empathy
Experimentation
Exams and Assessment
ExEC does not include any exams, choosing instead to focus student efforts on out-of-class projects. ExEC is however compatible with exams when appropriate or required by an institution.
For midterm or final exams, we recommend presenting students with a scenario and asking them to describe what should be done next. For example:
Illustrate the focal venture’s business model using the BMC. Students can also be asked to create different version of the BMC based on changes in a key aspect of the business model (e.g., customer segment).
Creating an interview guide (who to interview, where to find them, what to ask)
Identify the riskiest assumption of the focal venture’s business model and design an experiment to test it (what assumption to test, specifics of the experiment design, metric to track success)
For possible scenarios/cases that can be used for an exam, consider the following:
An episode of the podcast “The Pitch.” In each episode of this podcast, real entrepreneurs are pitching their ventures to real investors.
A news article about a newly-opened venture started by a local entrepreneur. (As an illustration, here is an article about an entrepreneur who started a shoe cleaning service). The business page of the local newspaper is a great source for possible scenarios.
Thoughts? Feedback?
That is the overview of the ExEC experiential assessment model. If you have any feedback, or suggestions on how to improve it, we’re all ears. Please leave a comment below.
We’d love to hear how you structure assessment in your experiential class.
On the other hand, if you…
Want Structured Assessment in your Class?
If you like engaging the power of experiential teaching and are looking for a structured approach to assessment, request your preview of ExEC today.
It only takes a couple of days to get a feel for the material and get your course set up to use it. If you’d like to try ExEC for your upcoming term, take a look today.
Click play above for the video version of this post.
Helping Your Students With Customer Interviews
In our last article, we used the business model canvas to describe why students should interview their customers. We also talked about how to motivate your students to actually conduct those interviews.
If you haven’t read that article yet, please do that now.
If you have, let’s talk about some of the common problems your students will experience when they get out of the building to talk to customers.
They’ll have trouble getting people to agree to interviews
They won’t find a pattern among the problems they’re hearing from people they interview
They won’t hear anything about the problems they want to solve
All of these problems are common and are…
The consequence of simply interviewing the wrong customers.
Which Customers To Interview?
Effective entrepreneurs interview their early adopters, so we need to teach our students who early adopters are and how they can find theirs.
To define early adopters, we’ll leverage definitions by Rogers, Moore, and Steve Blank, but with a twist to make the definition more actionable. You can start by reminding your students that…
Customers don’t buy products. Customers buy solutions to problems.
Your students shouldn’t think about early adopters in terms of their relationship to a product. We want them to think about Early Adopters in relationship to a problem.
Early adopters are people who have the problem that your students want to try and solve, know they have that problem, and. . .
Early Adopters are actively seeking a solution to their problem.
These customers, who are seeking a solution to their problem, are the ones you want your students to interviews.
Focus Customer Interviews on Early Adopters
If your students can find, and interview, their early adopters, they will have accomplished the single-most important aspect of finding Product-Market Fit.
That’s because during their interviews with early adopters, your students are going to validate their:
Customer segments
Value proposition
Customer relationships and
Channels
All told, interviewing early adopters will validate almost half of your students’ business models.
Plus, these interviews will form the basis of their experiments for the rest of the business model canvas.
On the other hand, if your students can’t find early adopters, they won’t have anyone to provide social proof to the early majority. That means they’re not going to find anyone who’s going to bring on the late majority or the laggards.
If they can’t find early adopters, it is very unlikely your students are going to find Product-Market Fit.
If your students can’t find people seeking a solution to a problem, it doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t need solving. It doesn’t mean that the business idea is bad. It means the time isn’t right to solve the problem.
If your students can’t find anyone seeking a solution to this problem, now is not the opportune time to try solving that problem. Your students could be too early to solve this problem, or they could be too late. We know that now is not the right time.
By trying to interview early adopters, your students can form the basis of their business model if they find them. If your students don’t find them, that’s helpful news as well, because they can pivot with confidence. If your students can’t find people seeking a solution to the problem, it’s better to know now than later, so they can another problem to solve that’s more likely to lead to their success.
Finding Early Adopters
When you teach your students how to find early adopters, you may find it easiest to contrast early adopters with the early majority, late majority, and laggards, especially if you can a case study to do it, like Airbnb.
Start by describing the problem your case study company solves. In this case, the problem Airbnb was trying to solve when it got started was that it was too hard to find cheap hotel rooms during a conference.
Next, describe the concept of laggards, people who literally don’t have the problem the entrepreneurs are trying to solve. Because they don’t have the problem, they don’t know they have the problem, and they’re not seeking a solution for that problem.
An example laggard for Airbnb’s early days might be someone attending a conference but their company pays for their room. Or someone who can expense any hotel costs they have, so they don’t worry about the cost.
Contrast that to the late majority. This is someone who has the problem the entrepreneurs want to solve, but doesn’t know it; they are not aware they have the problem. If your students are ever trying to convince someone they have a problem, they are likely talking to someone in the late majority. These are some of the worst people sell to, because they are not aware they have the problem. Someone who doesn’t know they have a problem is rarely willing to talk about solving that problem, and if someone won’t talk about solving a problem, they certainly won’t pay to solve it. It’s important that you educate your students about the late majority, otherwise they’ll try to “educate” all their customers to convince them they have a problem, and won’t make any traction.
In AirBnb’s example, a member of the late majority might be someone who charges the hotel room to a credit card, even though it’s too expensive for their budget. They may simply think this is the cost of doing business and not even realize they’re getting charged exorbitant fees for a room in high-demand.
Compare the late majority to the early majority. These are customers who know they have the problem, but are not seeking a solution to it. Maybe they have experienced the problem, and acknowledged it’s an annoyance, but they haven’t been so disturbed by it that they sought a solution. Or maybe they did seek a solution, and either found one that was good enough, or they didn’t, and assumed the problem wasn’t solvable. No matter what, a member of the early majority isn’t actively seeking a solution now (but will jump on one if they hear about it from an early adopter).
In the Airbnb example, a member of the early majority might be someone who skips the conference because they can’t find a cheap hotel room. They know rooms are too expensive. They searched for cheaper rooms online, but they couldn’t find something to fit their budget. They had other problems to solve so maybe they gave up and simply decided not to attend the conference.
The last, and most important, group is our early adopters. These customers not only know they have the problem the entrepreneurs want to solve, but are seeking a solution to that problem.
In the Airbnb example, an early adopter might be someone posting on the conference discussion group asking to share a room to lower their costs. Or maybe they’re searching the hostels in the area to find an affordable room.
To find these all-important early adopters, your students should brainstorm behaviors that indicate someone is seeking a solution to the problem. In the Airbnb example, the behavior would be “posting on a forum for a room share”, so to find those early adopters, the founders would simply look on the design forum.
Only Interview Early Adopters
Your students should avoid interviewing anyone who is not an early adopter for the problem they want to solve.
That’s because if your students interview non-early adopters, they will discover problems entirely unrelated to the problem they are trying to solve – and problems few people actively seeking solutions for.
Imagine your students asking a late majority, laggard, or early majority the hardest part about going to a conference in the Airbnb example. Because these non-early adopters customers are not aware of, or seeking a solution to the problem the founders want to solve, the customers will describe completely unrelated problems like…
The food isn’t very good
The presentations are boring
The tickets to the conference are too expensive
We don’t want your students getting distracted by these other problems – we want them to validate, or invalidate their current problem hypothesis.
To do that, your students’ best bet is to focus their attention on their early adopters. Your students can use their customers’ solution-seeking behavior to tell them where their early adopters are.
In the Class
Another case study that’s fun to use is Uber. Have your students think about the early days of Uber. The problem they were solving was the difficulty finding a cab in a big city like San Francisco.
Ask your students to describe a laggard in the Uber example. Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t take cabs at all – maybe they ride their bike everywhere.
Next, ask your students to describe an member of Uber’s original late majority. An example example could be someone who takes cabs but is often late. This segment, the late majority, take it for granted and don’t think cabs could be faster. To them, it’s part of their daily routine and they don’t think it’s a problem.
Now ask your students to identify behaviors exhibited by an early majority customer. Remind them this is someone who knows they have the problem. Maybe they have a black cab service on speed dial. They don’t want to use regular cabs because they’re too slow, so they’ll pay the extra price for a black cab service. The early majority is someone who has a solution that’s good enough for now.
Finally ask your students to identify behaviors exhibited by an early adopter. Remind them that early adopters are seeking a solution. They could be reading reviews on Yelp to find the fastest cab service in San Francisco, or they could be leaving reviews complaining about the slow response time for certain cab companies.
Remember: students should use early adopters’ solution-seeking behavior to find them for interviews.
For more details, take a look at the complete lesson plan we’ve provided below.
Get the Who are Early Adopters Lesson Plan
We’ve created an experiential, 45-minute, Who are Early Adopters Lesson Plan to help you teach your students who to interview. It encapsulates everything we’ve talked about above.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it.
All we ask is that you leave us some feedback on it the comments below so we can improve it!
Better Customer Interviews
In this article we described who early adopters are and how to find them. That will help your students conduct better interviews.
They will get more interviews.
Your students will find consistent problem patterns because they’re talking to people who are trying to solve that problem.
And Your students will find problems they want to solve because they’re not talking to late majority or laggards.
If they interview their early adopters, your students will form the basis of their business model. If they can’t find early adopters to interview, they’ll know isn’t the right time to solve the problem they hypothesized and they will have the confidence to pivot (to a backup idea they generated through their problem generation process).
What’s Next?
In future articles, we’ll talk about who your students should target for interviews, and what to ask during them. If you’d like those lesson plans, subscribe here to get them in your inbox.
Click play above for the video version of this post.
The Power of Customer Interviews
Most entrepreneurship teachers are familiar with how powerful customer interviews are in validating a business model. But how do we motivate our students to leverage that power?
So often our students resist conducting customer interviews.
Their push back makes sense:
They’re nervous about talking to strangers.
No one’s shown them how to do this interviewing thing.
They don’t learn this technique somewhere else.
They’ve never seen or heard sample interviews.
They are overwhelmed; it feels like too much work.
Students have to find people to interview, ask them for the interview, and conduct and analyze the interview.
All the while, they’re worried about looking and feeling stupid.
In the article below, we’re going to offer you a two-step approach to motivate your students to take advantage of…
The most powerful business model validation tool we have at our disposal: customer interviews.
The first step of this approach is to provide the underlying business model theory so they understand why customer interviews are a critical step in their validation journey. We’ll show you how to use the business model canvas to help you do that. But that’s not enough to get your students talking to customers.
You’ll also need the second step, which is to invite them to experience the transformative power of customer interviews by observing a real interview during an experiential exercise.
How do you communicate to your students that customer interviews are the critical component of business model validation? If you use the Business Model Canvas or the Lean Canvas, use them to illustrate this point.
Show a canvas to your students and pose this question:
“Which business model components will customer interviews help you validate?”
Most students point to the Customer Segments or Value Proposition components. Those are both correct, customer interviews will help them directly validate those components.
Customer interviews will also help them validate the Customer Relationships and Channels assumptions. It turns out, when done effectively…
Customer interviews will help your students validate assumptions for almost half of their business models.
The business model assumptions that interviews don’t validate directly will be validated indirectly because everything is derived from the top right corner of the business model canvas.
For this reason, customer interviews are not just a powerful tool,
Customer interviews are the most powerful tool we have for validating business models.
Well-executed customer interviews are far more useful than surveys, focus groups, market research or observations. Every hypothesis your students make can be validated with them, or as a direct result of what they learn during them.
Experiencing Customer Interviews
Once you’ve described why these interviews are so important, it’s time to let your students experience the power of customer interviews first hand. To do that, we invite you to run an exercise with them.
First, ask your students to create a product for parents of children with ADHD. You can do this individually or in teams, whatever fits your class best. The assignment is to design a product for this customer segment.
Note: many of of your students will have no clue how to serve this customer segment and will find this step of the exercise challenging…which is exactly what you want.
Next, ask them to design a Facebook ad to market their new product. The Facebook ad should include several components, including:
A compelling headline
An image and
A description that motivates their customer to take an action (e.g. Click here to learn more, Buy now, etc.).
Once your students have completed both steps, discuss how confident they are they’ve got a product customers will buy, and a compelling ad for that product. During this discussion, highlight the difficulties they encountered coming up with a product in a vacuum, and how difficult it is to come up with a compelling marketing strategy (or even one ad) without speaking to customers.
Make Customer Interviews Real
Next is the really fun part. In the lesson plan below, we’ve included a recording of a sample customer interview with the parent of a child who has ADHD. Play that interview for your students.
During the recording, your students will hear:
Two very real problems this mother has encountered,
The emotions the mother feels associated with those problems,
The solutions the mother has tried to solve those problems.
These three things – the problems, the emotions invoked by those problems, and the attempted solutions to the problems – are customer interviewing gold. Those are aspects on which we build all the components of a business model going forward.
Have your students listen to the interview so they can hear how informative these conversations can be. The first seven minutes of the recording is the interview itself. It’s worth noting that although this was an interview with a real potential customer, it was conducted as a demonstration. Most interviews your students will conduct will be 30-60 minutes long.
The following ten minutes of the recording are a group of students and I discussing what they heard during the interview. Consider listening to this section of the recording if you think it will help prepare you to answer questions your students may have.
Iterate
After listening to the interview, invite your students to redesign their product.
This time they get to leverage the fact that at least one mother of a child with ADHD has a problem getting that child to sleep. They also know that mother is worried about what sort of coping mechanisms her child will need once she’s an adult.
Your students should use the problem they heard during the interview as inspiration for their new products.
For any company they start, your students can leverage the conversations they have with their potential customers to design their company and the product.
Once they’ve designed their product, have them redesign their Facebook ad. During this phase, make sure your students leverage the guilt and frustration they heard from the mother.
Entrepreneurs use emotional language to connect with their customers and demonstrate they understand the customers’ problems. When a customer sees or hears language that resonates with them on an emotional level, they know “this person understands me.”
When your students create an ad that addresses the guilt of being a mother of a child with ADHD that has been undiagnosed, their potential customer perceives that ad more positively because “finally, someone understands my experience.”
Your students can also reference the competitive solutions the mother has tried to solve her problems. Using the problems, emotions, and solutions the mother evoked during the interview is a way for your students to tell customers like her,
“We understand your problem. And because we understand it, we are uniquely suited to solve your problem.”
After they’ve built their new ad, open a second discussion comparing and contrasting what it was like building a product in a vacuum without speaking to customers versus building a product and ad inspired by customer interviews.
Talk about the benefits of collaborating with customers to create a product, and how doing so can help them market that product as well. Talk about how willing the customer was to talk about her problems, and how she seemed to enjoy the experience (i.e. people enjoy being genuinely asked about their problems so they shouldn’t feel like they are imposing on their interviewees).
Also be sure to talk about how it may feel like extra, and sometimes uncomfortable, work to talk with customers before creating a product, but how…
Nothing accelerates the creation of a successful product more than talking to your customers about their problems.
Now that you know how to help your students feel what it’s like to use customer interviews as the inspiration for a new product, and can explain their relationship to the Business Model Canvas, you have the tools to motivate your students to do their own customer interviews.
For more details, take a look at the complete lesson plan we’ve provided below, including the link to the sample interview recording.
Get the Experiencing Customer Interviews Lesson Plan
We’ve created an experiential, 45-minute, Experiencing Customer Interviews Lesson Plan to help you motivate your students to talk to their customers. It encapsulates everything we’ve talked about above.
Use it as a basis to motivate your students to interview customers.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it.
All we ask is that you leave us some feedback on it the comments below so we can improve it!
Interviews, Not Guesses
You want students to develop powerful solutions that solve real problems for real customers. To do that,
They need to become comfortable interviewing customers.
If you want your students to interview customers so their solutions are more powerful, try this technique in your next course.
In future articles, we’ll talk about who your students should target for interviews, and what to ask during them. If you’d like those lesson plans, subscribe here to get them in your inbox.
