August 26, 2013

Teaching what cannot be taught?

Today I started a teaching gig in Entrepreneurship at NITH again. Hopefully it is going to be good fun (at least for me) and I try to make it as practical as possible. The students will work out their own Business Model Canvas and hopefully get experimenting (they are going to hear me quote Steve Blank's "get the heck out of the office" more, in fact I said it twice already...) for real as soon as possible.

Some groups have already founded companies, while for others it will remain mostly a normal school subject. It will be a challenge to make it interesting for such a diverse group of people, but like I said in my intro, I truly think (even if it may sound a bit cheesy) that if they'll give it all, it will for sure make it the best school subject they ever had, and it might even be life-changing if they come out in the other with a successful company founded.

The group is a bit large, so the final pitch/presentation is going to be done via handing in a video. Goods and bads about that, but will be fun to see what the students come up with. I told them "screen capture of your presentation with voiceover is fine", but I certainly hope some of them will take the opportunity to get a bit more creative.

Trying to explain stuff is at least a good way to force yourself to think stuff through, which is also my main motivation for doing these gigs (besides fun and what one might call the CSR side of it - the pay is truly awful). And this semester I will be doing much of the same exercise my students are doing, but for real with my own company (as mentioned in the previous post, I will be going to a tech incubator in Palo Alto with TapBookAuthor this autumn). After the best summer in 30 years in Norway weather-wise, let's hope I'll experience the entrepreneurial equivalent this autumn both with my company and my students.

PS. My answer to my own rhetorical question, if you can really teach entrepreneurship, was that I can at least try to teach them a bunch of techniques that will be very useful for them as entrepreneurs...