There’s An App For That – Teaching Discovery Driven Planning In The Entrepreneurship Curriculum
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"I’m often asked whether it is possible to teach entrepreneurship – or more importantly – having an entrepreneurial mindset. Well, I can’t teach you passion or hard work. What I can teach you is how to de-risk projects and how to build the right kind of plan."
- Rita McGrath
Together, we thrive
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Fascination with entrepreneurship education
While it’s hard to remember these days, there was a time when entrepreneurship education was seen as a niche offering for a small audience.
My mentor and co-author Ian MacMillan is widely regarded as having laid much of the groundwork for the burgeoning field, with the creation of the global entrepreneurship network, founding of the journal Journal of Business Venturing, creation of the first truly global database studying cross-cultural aspects of entrepreneurship and among the first empirical research in the field.
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Managers create value in two ways. One is by generating revenues in the present. The other is by creating option value for the future. Option value represents the right to make future choices, when you have more information.”
Option Value – the heart of de-risking ventures
Presentations are communication tools that can be used as demonstrations, lectures, speeches, reports, and more. Most of the time, they’re presented before an audience. It serves a variety of purposes, making them powerful tools for convincing and teaching.
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The SparcHub software for educators
That concept sounds reasonable, right? And yet I find that when educators try to reinforce this with students, the concept seems very hard to grasp. This was a major motivation to create an app that would act as a spine, or guide, for the process of building new ventures. We reinforce the right way to approach an uncertain venture in every part of the software. As he will tell you, it embeds the kind of mindset that entrepreneur Jay Steinfeld brought to his venture, Blinds.com. It’s about smart risk-taking.
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Allocating time and money to checkpoints
With exploratory funds (whether real or classroom-based) in place, the next step in building out the plan is to determine which checkpoints, or early tests, will teach us the most about the critical assumptions we are making. These are completely flexible and can be customized by the students, or the instructor can create a pre-existing template.
In the software, we connect the budget for a project directly to the activities related to what the team is doing to learn.
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Capturing learning
At each checkpoint, students can enter what they are learning as they do the actual work of defining their concept. They do this in the checkpoint details page. Comments are captured in real time and you can go back and reference them. The reason this is valuable is that over the course of a semester or a few months, assumptions tend to be forgotten. With this functionality, the students can enter their discoveries and capture their learning as it happens.
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Reducing uncertainty systematically
The system also allows students to score their projects on the basis of risk factors that can lead to project failure. This list comes from my own research of ways in which not being clear about what is driving the business can cost teams dearly. They capture their understanding of emerging risk by scoring their opportunities against questions regarding different elements of their business model. In the beginning, we assume that all elements are “highly uncertain.”
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There’s more
The system also allows you to set up strategic scorecards that are unique to your classroom, to capture ideas and sort them, and to look at the overall progress of a whole class’s projects and the progress of each student or group within it.
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How and who might use this?
We see several potential audiences for this. In the MBA and Executive MBA classroom, this could be used in conjunction with the teaching of specific techniques and can capture the effectiveness of students’ use. In Executive Education, it can help participants make progress on a real project. And in corporate development settings, it could be used to create greater coherence among teams and more widespread understanding of the techniques of discovery driven planning across the organization. We envisage the software being sold the same way textbooks are – the students would simply buy an instance on a credit card and have access to it for a given duration.
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What’s next?
We’re going to run a beta for educators beginning at the end of March, 2023 and going through May. We hope to be able to have some classes up and running as early as the summer of 2023! Contact Jacora Kiser – Jacora @ Valize.com if you are interested in joining.
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