Archive for the ‘Entrepreneurship’ Category

Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy: The Online Venture Challenge

Posted: December 11, 2015 in BUSI 2800, Entrepreneurship
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As I mentioned in my last post, I was determined to provide students with a real-life entrepreneurship experience. Sprott’s BUSI2800 is an intro to entrepreneurship course open to all; therefore there is quite a diversity of programs and expertise in the classroom. Searching for an online gamified platform, I came across the concept of the VentureChallenge this past summer and decided to pilot it this fall. Developed by Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia and in partnership with Shopify, the online Venture Challenge takes students through the entire entrepreneurial process, from the idea stage to launching and running the business, with the help of built-in learning resources and a gamified platform that includes a class leaderboard. Students learn about ideation, product development, marketing, sales, cash management, e-commerce, social media and more.

In this experiential approach, student teams conceive of a new business idea for a NFP mission-driven e-commerce venture that runs for 30 days to raise money for a selected charity organization. This is not a simulation but rather an online approach to support the creation of a non-profit mission-driven online business.  Students are running real businesses, selling real products and services to real customers through an online store. With Shopify, student teams can set up their business very efficiently since a streamlined process guides them through launching their online store with no technical skills required.

At Sprott, our philosophy for our entrepreneurship offerings is for our students to ‘Live entrepreneurship, not just learn about it’. This project is a low risk experiential learning experience that provides concrete knowledge and skills in new venture creation. This specific project also emphasizes aspects of social entrepreneurship given its mission-driven goal. An additional innovative aspect is the extensive online learning resources and tasks so that students can acquire crucial skills in the business management of popular social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Adwords and Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and social metrics to promote, sell and monitor effectiveness of marketing campaigns and offerings. These skills are in high demand with employers. Carleton University is currently the only Ontario university using this experiential learning approach to entrepreneurship.

In all, the class created 22 venture teams who ran a wide range of businesses. The businesses were active for the month of November and together served nearly 700 customers, raising $18,700 in revenues with $4,700 in profits going to local charities. The results surpassed all expectations. I was very impressed with the creativity and dedication of the students to this exercise. They experienced every aspect of conceiving and running a small business. They also developed an awareness of social entrepreneurship.

2800A F15 OVC PIC Kekoa Tang giving cheque to OHS 151211

Kekoa Tang giving his team’s profits of $1,400 to the Ottawa Humane Society

The top team VESI Bottle, sold nearly $2,500 worth of glass water bottles sandblasted with custom messages, predominantly targeted at the millennials market, and pulled in about $1,400 in profits that were donated to the Ottawa Humane Society.

The second team, Groceries2Go, created a grocery shopping and delivery service for Carleton Students. They generated $3,300 in revenues, the highest among the teams.  Their profits went to the Carleton University Food Center.  Feedback from the students has been very positive, even though the challenge required an intense and sustained effort from the teams. The School is quite happy with the results and we will be offering it in future BUSI2800 classes.

A research project is also in the works to assess the impact of this entrepreneurship education approach on entrepreneurial intentions and behaviors, and also link to research on social entrepreneurship.  Although it required commitment and effort on my part to learn and use it, the outcomes are really worth it. I received appreciation letters from some of the charities that brought tears to my eyes…. Never expected such outcomes and impacts.   I should add that the support from the OVC team has been simply phenomenal.  In conclusion, I highly recommend the Venture Challenge.

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New experiential entrepreneurship pilot

Posted: October 11, 2015 in Entrepreneurship
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I am teaching a course new to me this term.  The course is an entry level, 2nd year course on entrepreneurship, and the first in our suite of entrepreneurship courses for our  Sprott School of Business B. Comm concentration in Entrepreneurship and minor in Entrepreneurship. This course is open to all, therefore students in the class are exposed to a great variety of educational programs, backgrounds and experiences.

I have decided to pilot a new initiative in this course this term.  Teams of four students launch a real online business, supported by Online Venture Challenge, an online gamified learning platform partnered with Shopify and developed by Prof. Geoff Archer from Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC, Canada.

This is a unique experiential approach: each team selects a charity organization to give their profits to. Teams brainstorm potential business ideas for products or services and launch their online stores on Shopify.  There is a competition among teams as well as a pitching event.  At the end of the term, profits will go to the selected charity organizations.

At  Sprott School of Business, we believe that students  learn best about entrepreneurship by doing entrepreneurship…  As such, they will learn valuable marketable skills such as ideation, feasibility assessment, business models, minimal viable products, social media tools and an integrated communication strategy, team work, role of a CFO and much more.

I will update on the progress!

Users, Payers and Multi-Sided Markets

Posted: November 13, 2014 in Business Models, Entrepreneurship
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An excellent use of 2 minutes of your time to understand a multi-sided markets – using Google and its business model.

Steve Blank

If you can’t see the video click here

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Teaching entrepreneurship

Posted: September 7, 2014 in Entrepreneurship
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I am quite excited about my new function as Assistant Professor, Global Entrepreneurship at Carleton University – Sprott School of Business and teaching entrepreneurship courses using new pedagogical approaches.  In particular, I’ll be using the Startup Owner’s Manual from Blank and Dorf (2012) and the Business Model Generation text from Pigneur and Osterwalder (2010).  Several colleagues teaching at Sprott and elsewhere have adopted such approaches to teaching entrepreneurship and are quite enthusiastic about their early successes.  In addition, with all online resources available from Blank and others, it becomes a great opportunity to go with a blended learning approach.  At Sprott, we really believe in having students experience entrepreneurship rather than only learning about it.  Along with our ecosystem and support mechanisms, we are confident that we can help students develop their entrepreneurial minds.

I’ll report on our progress in future blogs!

Venture Capital in Canada

Posted: November 20, 2013 in BUSI 3810 Course, Entrepreneurship
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Innovative and high-growth firms need access to capital to ensure success.   In addition to the typical start-up sources of capital – love money, crowdsourcing, angels and the maze of public sector  support,  such firms – early – and late-stages, need access to venture capital (VC) funds.  In Canada, as in most other OECD countries, equity provided in the form of venture capital decreased between 2007 and 2009 and rose slightly in 2010 (OECD 2012). Canada’s venture capital industry has been challenged on a number of fronts in recent years, including persistent poor returns that have led to low fundraising and have limited the amount of capital available to fuel the growth off Canadian start-up businesses (Canada’s Economic Action Plan). In the technology sector, venture capital declined steadily following the tech bubble burst of the early 2000, and returns on investments have been dismal since.   Consequently many high-tech firms are often forced to go south of the border to access US venture capital, leading to a lost of Canadian tech talent to places like Silicon Valley.

Canadian VC investment activity remained at a steady state in 2012 compared to 2011: $1.47 billion in 2012 vs. $1.51 billion in 2011, in about 458 firms each year. Total deal sizes under $1 million represented nearly half of all deals completed in 2012, a continuation of a trend that has become more pronounced in recent years. Software and Internet-focused firms captured about half of VC investments in 2012 (Industry Canada).  Some predicts that 2013 will see  the VC landscape in Canada shifting.  Of note, the federal government’s announced last January  the Venture Capital Action plan, a comprehensive strategy for deploying the $400 Million in new capital over the next 7 to 10 years, which is expected to attract close to $1 billion in new private sector investments in funds of funds (Canada’s Economic Action Plan).

Questions to ponder:

1) What are the overall goals and mechanisms of the Government of Canada’s Venture Capital Action Plan announced in its Economic Action Plan 2012 ?

2) What are the key VC funds in Canada?

3) What are the key VC funds in the US?

4) How would you characterize the Canadian VC funds versus the US VC funds?

5) What are some of the trends happening on the Canadian VC scene?

References:

Canada’s Economic Action Plan – Venture Capital Action Plan http://actionplan.gc.ca/en/initiative/venture-capital-action-plan-0

Industry Canada, Venture Capital Monitor www.ic.gc.ca/vcmonitor

OECD 2012, ‘Canada’, in Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs 2012: An OECD Scoreboard, OECD Publishing. http:://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264166769-6-en

Technology entrepreneurs and incubators & accelerators

Posted: March 1, 2013 in Entrepreneurship
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Technology entrepreneurship rarely succeeds in isolation; increasingly, it occurs in interconnected networks of business partners and other organizations. For entrepreneurs lacking access to an established business ecosystem, incubators and accelerators provide a possible support mechanism for access to partners and resources. Yet, these relatively recent approaches to supporting entrepreneurship are still evolving. Therefore, it can be challenging for entrepreneurs to assess these mechanisms and to make insightful decisions on whether or not to join an incubator or accelerator, and which incubator or accelerator best meets their needs.

In a recent article in Technology and Innovation Management Review, I discuss five key factors that entrepreneurs should take into consideration about incubators and accelerators are offered. Insights are drawn from two surveys of managers and users of incubators and accelerators. An understanding of these five key success factors (stage of venture, fit with incubator’s mission, selection and graduation policies, services provided, and network of partners) and potential pitfalls will help entrepreneurs confidently enter into a relationship with an incubator or accelerator.

– See more at: http://timreview.ca/article/656#sthash.G9uvzT1X.dpuf

Start-ups and business plans: is it a good idea or not?

Posted: August 28, 2012 in Entrepreneurship
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Business planning cards

Business planning cards (Photo credit: plantoo47)

I went to an interesting seminar last week at HEC Montréal (Hautes Études Commerciales, business school affiliated with the University of Montreal) on pedagogical methods and trends in the teaching of entrepreneurship.  Highly diverse and enthusiastic bunch, willing to share their teaching methods, tricks, and challenges.

One aspect in particular caught my attention: that is the trends of not ‘teaching’ business plans to students in entrepreneurship.  As can be expected, this was not a unanimous position….    the trend started in the US  (Standford, Harvard, etc.) where there is now less emphasis on teaching about business plans.  Apparently, Canadian business people spend 2 to 3 times more effort preparing business plans than in the US…

That brought me back to my long experience as an Industrial Technology Advisor with the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP).  IRAP’s mission is to help Canadian companies grow stronger, faster and bigger with innovation and technology.  A lot of my client SMEs (in several parts of the country) were high-tech start-ups with little more than basic stuff, few people, even fewer financial resources but with a great idea partially developed into a product/process/service.  I recall in particular a minimalist biotech start-up that had a sheet of plywood and two saw horses as a conference table… but talk about knowledge and advanced IT systems in that firm…  In any case, my point is that most of these firms were led by engineers or scientists with few resources, if any, to hire personnel to complement their skill-sets.  Not surprisingly, they were often at a loss as to what to include in a business plan and how to go about it…. I would get comments like: ‘but Diane, what do YOU want to see in this business plan?’ well…. that was not MY business plan nor MY firm….. Most of them had a fairly good vision of what they were trying to accomplish and most importantly, how, but packaging this into a detailed business plans with market and financial forecasts what a challenge, to say the very least.  Some hired consultants to do it so that they could satisfy a variety of demands (government programs, lenders, etc). They obviously did not ‘own’ the plan then as it was prepared by someone else.   I’m not saying that a business plan is useless… But my observations  are that it generally takes way too long for  business people to put a traditional business plan together, often with mediocre results, and obviously it becomes obsolete as soon as Print is pressed on a keyboard, if not sooner…..    Yet, the pace of everything is so much faster that if we want our Canadian firms to succeed in this global world, there’s got to be a better way…  So  it is refreshing to see new trends along the lines of developing the opportunity (Kawasaki, Ries etc), and new approaches to teach entrepreneurship.

What do you think?  any direct/indirect experience with business plans for start-ups? let’s hear it!