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What if schools start teaching entrepreneurship to students?
This is exactly what Steve Blank did working with the Hawken School. For Adelaide to be a city of entrepreneurs, I think this is a place to work on too.
Teaching Students to Think Like Entrepreneurs not Accountants We realized that past K-12 Entrepreneurial classes taught students “the lemonade stand” version of how to start a company: 1) come up with an idea, 2) execute the idea, 3) do the accounting (revenue, costs, etc.).
We wanted to teach our students how to think like entrepreneurs not accountants. Therefore we needed them to think and learn about two parts of a startup; 1) ideation – how to create new ideas and 2) customer development – how do they test the validity of their idea (is it the right product, customer, channel, pricing, etc.)
Our first insight was that if broke the class in half, and separated ideation from customer development, our students would understand 1) that _an idea is not the __company, 2) almost all initial ideas are wrong. _
So rather than starting with their own business ideas, we decided to first give our students experience doing customer discovery on someone else’s idea. Then in the second half of our semester let our students come up with their own ideas and then run the customer discovery process on their own product.