A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship

Wanna Learn Entrepreneurship?
Stanford University runs an experiment in teaching entrepreneurship, called the Lean LaunchPad , designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup. Steve Blank writes about the course in his blog.

The USP of the course is “teach entrepreneurship like you teach artists – combining theory – with intensive hands-on practice”.

The program helps students get a hands-on experience in how to start a new company. The highlight of the course is teams of students put the theory to work, using these tools to get out of the building and talk to customer/partners, etc. to get hard-earned information.

Stanford invited entrepreneurs and VCs to volunteer as coaches/mentors for the class’s teams. Even the mentors were provided with the mentor guide which outlined the course goals and mentor responsibilities.

The most interesting part of the class happens outside the classroom, each team spending 50-80 hours a week testing their business model hypotheses by talking to customers and partners and (in the case of web-based businesses) building their product.
Have a look at the course overview, business models and customer development at the given slide deck:

If this much of information encourages you to delve deep inside the course designed for   wannabe entrepreneurs and start ups, click here

For WITS Zen readers’ convenience, part one is here, two is here , and three is here.