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Back to Back Winners at USASBE 2020

Back to Back Winners at USASBE 2020

At this year’s USASBE conference, we were incredibly humbled to win the Excellence in Entrepreneurial Exercises Awards again, this time with our Lottery Ticket Dilemma lesson plan!

Winning the 3E competition is the highest achievement an entrepreneurship exercise designer can win – we like to think of it as the Super Bowl for entrepreneurial pedagogy nerds (that’s us!).

We were privileged to have 4 out of the 10 exercises selected for the awards, including our popular 60 Minute MVP lesson plan which was a finalist and has recently been published in the Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy Journal. Slides for all of these lessons are available below.

One of our founders, Doan Winkel, became President-Elect of USASBE. We look forward to his leadership of this great organization.
Educational Materials

In addition to our annual happy hour, we hosted our first-ever Innovator’s dinner.

Entrepreneurship Lesson Plans

This definitely was our favorite conference yet. USASBE gives us a space to share and learn. We came away from the conference reinvigorated to continue improving our product to provide you and your students even more value.

This year we:

  • Hosted our annual happy hour and first Innovator’s dinner
  • Ran six sessions, featuring experiential entrepreneurship exercises from our ExEC curriculum
  • And the pièce de résistance…
We won the Excellence in Entrepreneurial Exercises (3E) competition again!
Teaching Entrepreneurship Lesson Plans
Winning this award has validated we are on the right track when it comes to creating truly innovative entrepreneurship programs.

After winning the 3E competition, we were delighted to join our fellow educators at the USASBE Gala.

Thanks to your engagement in our events, we had a fantastic conversation that covered:

  • what we wish for our students and entrepreneurship education as a whole,
  • what we wish for ourselves as entrepreneurship educators,
  • the barriers to creating engaging curriculum
  • how to make entrepreneurial skills accessible to all students

We had a wonderful time hosting happy hour as well as our inaugural Innovator’s dinner on Friday night. It was wonderful connect with other educator’s with an aligned vision and we enjoyed demoing our financial simulator:

Education Lesson Plans
Entrepreneurship Lesson Plans

As always, thank you for supporting us, challenging us, and for sharing our passion for engaging students everywhere.

New Orleans was an amazing host, but we’re already planning for next year’s USASBE conference in Los Angeles. We hope you join us!

Entrepreneurship Education Online
If you want access to our slides from USASBE, you can access them here.
Entrepreneurship Lesson Plans
Countdown to USASBE 2020

Countdown to USASBE 2020

See You In New Orleans!

Our team is busy getting ready for the USASBE conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. The conference gives space for entrepreneurship educators to come together to share innovative research and experiential ideas for teaching entrepreneurship.

USASBE Entrepreneurship Exercises

Eat & Drink with Us

Teaching Entrepreneurship USASBE
  • Enjoy great food and drink
  • Connect with like-minded professionals
  • Get inspired with thought-provoking conversation
Behind the Scenes of our Last Happy Hour

See Our Lesson Plans in Action

We’re leading 6 talks this year during the conference:

Sunday Sessions

Normalizing Failing through the Wish Game (Sunday @ 9:30 am in Chamber III)

This exercise was borrowed from faculty at Stanford University and developed into the foundation of an MBA Entrepreneurship course to teach entrepreneurship skills by classmates iteratively delivering wishes for each other. This exercise is a powerful path to students learning entrepreneurial skills like ideation, customer interviewing, prototyping, selling, and mobilizing resources, all in the context of creating memorable experiences for their fellow classmates.

60 Minute MVP (Sunday @ 9:30 am in Conti)

The 60 Minute MVP is an intense and exciting exercise that teaches critical aspects of the entrepreneurial mindset and lean start-up methodology, namely the iterative process of hypothesis testing through the creation of minimum viable products (MVPs). In 60 minutes, with no prior technical expertise, students work in teams to design a landing page, create an explainer video, and set up a way to measure pre-launch demand from prospective customers by accepting pre-orders or email addresses. 

What Happens When (Female) Students Dare to Dream? (Sunday @ 3:15 pm in Lafitte)

There are not enough female students in entrepreneurship and innovation programs and career paths. This expose will introduce a proven program that successfully addresses this inequity: a series of college-student driven events targeting the entrepreneurial confidence, vulnerability, and action of high school students (particularly female students). Participants will learn the framework for how these high-impact events can be developed and delivered in any university setting and scaled to a city-wide event, and to intensive summer camps and overnight retreats.

Monday Sessions

Customer Interviewing: Learning the Basics Through Gamification (Monday @ 9:30 am in Bienville)

This is a fun, interactive exercise will demonstrate to students: What their problem interviewing goals should be and should not be, and based on those goals; What questions they should and should not ask during customer interviews; Educators follow up the card game by giving students an interview script template they can use as the basis for their problem discovery interviews. After students experience this exercise, they will have a robust customer interview script they can use to increase the quality of their interviews, and their confidence in conducting them. 

Entrepreneurs vs Inventors: The Lottery Ticket Dilemma (Monday @ 9:30 am in Bienville)

This exercise provides a fun, experiential way for students to conceptualize customer behavior, and identify business opportunities, by demonstrating it’s not actually customer problems that drive behavior, it’s customer emotions. After this game-based activity, students understand why some products are successful even if they don’t solve an obvious problem, and how to leverage that fact to identify non-problem based opportunities. Attendees to this session will get to experience the lesson themselves, and leave with a lesson plan they can use to integrate this exercise in their classes.

Fears & Curiosities: Engaging ALL Students on Day 1 (Monday @ 1:45 pm in Chamber III)

This exercise helps students understand the value of their entrepreneurship classes, even if they never envision themselves becoming an entrepreneur, helping them engage with the class from the first day. The exercise starts with students sharing their fears and curiosities about life after college in a fun and engaging way. After this exercise, students will understand the value of what they are about to learn in their entrepreneurship course, regardless of their relationship to entrepreneurship.

We hope to see you at one of our sessions or join us for a drink and dinner. Invite a friend! The more the merrier.

Federico, Doan & Justin

Teaching Entrepreneurship

Winning 1st Place at USASBE 2019

Winning 1st Place at USASBE 2019

This year’s USASBE conference, a gathering of hundreds of the best experiential entrepreneurship instructors from around the world, was a harrowing one for us.

We survived a strep throat breakout, an unimaginably poorly timed dead laptop, an all-nighter prepping exercise kits, and lost luggage.

Despite the challenges, or perhaps because of them, this was our favorite conference yet. We shared, we learned, and we got energized to improve our product and process to provide you and your students more value.

This year we:

  • Had 100+ people show up to our TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Happy Hour,
  • Interviewed Steve Blank, the godfather of evidence-based entrepreneurship,
  • Ran three sessions, featuring experiential entrepreneurship exercises from our ExEC curriculum,
  • and the highlight….

We won the Excellence in Entrepreneurial Exercises (3E) competition!

Winning the 3E competition is the highest achievement an entrepreneurship exercise designer can win – the Super Bowl for entrepreneurial pedagogy nerds (that’s us!).

This win isn’t about lower-case us (Justin, Federico, Doan and the rest of the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org team). It is about US – the first version of this exercise was inspired by our work with you, the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org community.

This award is recognition for the work we all do, for the feedback and engagement you have generously provided over the past few years.

The recognition is not an arrival point, but is validation we are on the right track, and an inflection point to co-create even more value for our students.

After winning the 3E competition, Justin and Federico quickly turned their attention (until 4am!) to assembling curriculum kits for our happy hour.

Despite just three hours of sleep, Justin (we call him The Champ!) brought his full high-fiving, chair-jumping energy to the competition the next morning, presenting our Toothbrush Design Challenge with an unparalleled passion that inspired the audience and judges. It was a sight to behold.

 

We also sat down for an hour-long, 1-on-1 interview with Steve Blank on the future of entrepreneurship education.

Thanks to your questions, we had a fantastic conversation that covered:

  • the ideal class an entrepreneurship major should include,
  • the weaknesses of customer development and Lean Startup,
  • the academic research around Lean Startup, and
  • how to balance exposing students to the harsh realities of entrepreneurship, while still making entrepreneurial skills accessible to all students

Click here for the full video as soon as it’s released!

And of course, we had a wonderful time hosting happy hour on Friday night. We celebrated our collective success, and enjoyed demoing some new ExEC lesson plans:

Thank you, for supporting us, for challenging us, and for sharing our passion with your students and colleagues. Our success doesn’t happen without you!

Florida was an amazing host, but we’re already planning for next year’s USASBE conference in New Orleans. We hope you join us!

If you want to introduce your students to the #1 Experiential Entrepreneurship Exercise, request a preview of ExEC here


USASBE 2019 – See You in Florida!

USASBE 2019 – See You in Florida!

Are you going to the USASBE conference in St. Pete Beach, FL in January? You should – we got so much value from last year’s conference.

This conference is an incredible few days of entrepreneurship educators and folks planning entrepreneurship programs sharing their work and ideas.

If you’re going, we’ll see you there!

Friday Night Party

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first. We’re hoping to host our second-annual happy hour party Friday night after the conference activities. We’ve got room for 100 USASBE Conference attendees to join us, so register here if you’d like to attend.

3 Talks + A Competition

We’ll be leading a handful of sessions during the conference:

  • Mechanical Pencil Challenge: Defining “Early Adopters” And Where To Find Them (Fri. @9:30 am in the Banyan room & again Sun. @9:30 am in Blue Heron).

This exercise uses mechanical pencils, and a 10-minute competition between attendees, to introduce Early Adopters. We contrast them with Early Majority and Late Majority customers, and demonstrate where and how to find a business model’s Early Adopters.

  • A Better Toothbrush: Testing Assumptions Via Customer Observations (Fri. @9:30 am in the Banyan room & again Sun. @ 9:30 am in Blue Heron).

This fun and high energy exercise utilizes children’s toothbrushes to help attendees see how easily they can make hidden assumptions that hinder the success of a project. We introduce attendees to customer observations, a tool to mitigate the consequences of hidden assumptions. Overall, this is an engaging Design Thinking exercise that encourages attendees to assume less, and observe more.

  • Rigorously Assessing Experiential Courses: Transparent Grading Using Check-Ins, Mini-Cases, And Reflections (Sat. @ 9:30 am in Snowy Egret).

During this session, attendees feel how frustrating it is to be evaluated by vague/subjective criteria. Attendees learn five tools for transparently evaluating experiential courses and then brainstorm ways they can incorporate these techniques in their course. Attendees leave with session with a set of detailed sample rubrics that will enable them to both teach more experientially and assess more objectively.

The Mechanical Pencil Challenge and the Better Toothbrush exercise

…are finalists for the 3E Experiential Entrepreneurial Exercises Competition!

Come cheer us on at 9:30am on Friday in Banyan!

Hope to see you there!

Justin, Doan and Federico