Teaching Entrepreneurship

Last year I was teaching entrepreneurship at Zonaspace, a leading coworking space in Russia. We are licensing our program to 22 cities across 4 countries, graduating 500+ projects in our first year. Hopefully, our lessons can be useful for entrepreneurship teachers across the world.

Format

Admissions. We admit project teams, one person or more, from all areas of entrepreneurship. Most common directions include IT, mobile, e-commerce, local services, b2b services, education, events, and media. The project can be already defined or a team is committed to determine it early in the course. In person interview is used to admit a project and make a decision on possible financial aid. Rejected teams can participate in theory-only mode.

Assessment and learning plan. During admission interview we determine the most relevant learning areas for every project. As a result everyone starts the program with an individual learning plan.

Theory. On day one we give all teams access to the full videocourse. Students can watch lectures in any order. Obviously, we recommend focus on modules from one’s learning plan.

Our course goes over three major areas. Opportunity search covers self assessment, trending business models, finding an idea, validating an idea, goal settings, and planning. Entrepreneurial marketing includes
positioning, branding/naming, SEO, SMM, PR, sales, negotiation, and business development. Operations gives basics in recruitment, team structure, project management, culture, legal, finances and fundraising.

Homework. Every module has a hometask associated with it. Our lectures are like recipes, they give actionable instructions to achieve a specific goal for your project. E.g., if the topic is pricing, the homework task is to write down your pricing structure. Using another analogy, our lectures are similar to algorithms, students enter their project data and compute the result.

Interaction. Students come to face-to-face consulting sessions in their city. Every consulting session (aka office hours) has 3-7 guest experts labeled by expertise areas. Every expert maintains a piece of paper with a queue of projects that are interested in his help. Consulting sessions run similarly to speed dating events. Typically, every team spends 15-30 minutes with an expert, talking to 2-5 experts in one day. The city’s curator is present in all expert days.

Graduation. The course is concluded by team presentations (2-5 minutes per team). Guests include local press, angels, friends and alumni from previous batches.

Program volume. We think that for an introductory course, it is optimal to have 10 hours of videolecture load (based on individual learning plan), 5 expert sessions and 1-3 live lecture events (success stories from top entrepreneurs in the city + graduation day). The full course can fit into one month.

Alumni tracking. Once a project is graduated, we keep tracking its progress, checking in every few months. In fact, we track achievements of project leaders rather than projects themselves. Projects change, people stay.

Lessons Learned

Utilized idea is the unit of learning. This is the opposite to academic focus on mastered knowledge. We’d rather teach five ideas and see all of them used than teach twenty ideas with only two of them implemented. We want students to utilize ideas to succeed with projects, not because it is a good way to internalize the knowledge.

You do not buy food because its popular or required. You only buy food that you intend to eat. Applied education is like food for hungry mind. And it should be as utility-driven.

Do not waste students time. Without pressure to get a degree students can drop out at any moment. You have a goodwill balance with every student. Every time you advance their project the balance goes up, every minute that was not useful the balance goes down. As soon as balance goes negative, students leave.

We start with a hometask and build a lecture around it.

Looking at lecture scripts we delete, delete, and delete until only the core most useful things remain.

Information density is enormously important. Look at the first sentence of a typical videlecture. Almost always you can cut it without any loss. In fact, you can cut a half from most lectures. Applicable ideas are the units of learning. The more ideas you pack into a videolecture the better. Students can view on repeat and dig further on their own. But they can’t recover wasted time.

Entrepreneurship is subjective and open-ended. Some encourage having friends as cofounders, some discourage. Some prefer cloning proven models, some prefer innovation. You have to present competing points of view in transparent and neutral way. Most current courses present a particular one-sided and biased view on the subject.

Sometimes you need to talk people out of bad ideas. Ideas like personalized news or an event recommendation system came almost to all IT entrepreneurs. Thousands have tried, the existence of demand is still unclear, a new team has no strengths to single out. Would you help them or would you advise them to change the idea? We look deeper into these teams, trying to match their core interests to real, high demand and unsolved challenges in the market.

A significant part of our course is about preventing common mistakes.

Many first time entrepreneurs put their prices too low. “Increase your prices” is almost always a good advice.

Ask students to write down their core challenges and burning issues. In the classroom, we are ready to help from the first minute, without wasting fifteen minutes of generic project description. If the issue is to hire a salesperson or to get a press coverage, we work directly on that. Entrepreneurs love to talk but it does not advance their projects. Our classroom time is focused on expert-driven conversations that start from written project descriptions and identified challenges.

Entrepreneurship has its own fashion waves. One year coworking spaces and bubble tea stands are popular, then everyone talks about private kindergartens, then there is a wave of SMM agencies.These waves move around the world with a significant delay and regional entrepreneurs are actively looking for advice/experience from wave frontrunners. Many of our students are starting businesses inspired by current waves. It is safer than unproven innovation and more fun than buying a franchise.

Pre-startups. Many students loooking to start a business are not ready for it. We advise them to do a pre-startup project instead. It can be a blog, an event, a one-time stand at local weekend market or a consulting project for one client.

We’ve started with entrepreneurship courses in Russian speaking countries. Our next step is to launch a US-based company that will run online+offline entrepreneurship courses across the globe.

What is your view on entrepreneurship education? How can we bring world-class entrepreneurship education to every city in the world?

Shoot me an email at yury@yury.name.