Venture Creation Circles (VC²):
Piloting Experiential Entrepreneurial Learning @ K-State
Vincent Amanor-Boadu and Stephen Dyer
We want to nurture a team of students to, in less than one year, transform an idea into a venture. We will do this by introducing them to a new way of thinking, seeing, behaving, acting and living. This fast-paced, intensive and structured program is aimed at accelerating the development of the entrepreneurial mindset on our campus and facilitating the introduction and growth of the K-State entrepreneurship program.
Venture Creation Circles (VC²) has the singular objective of helping an increasing number of students in our university fall in love with entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial lifestyle. We seek to make them bold and fearless experimenters, positioning them to discover the incredible power of their inherent creativity and the knowledge they are receiving here at K-State.
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
For convenience and accelerated introduction, VC² is organized as an independent-study project under the direction of faculty advisors. As a student-centered project, VC² focuses on helping students develop an understanding and appreciation of the business aspects of their specific degree program, helping them independently string the core components of their discipline together in a way that helps reveal its essence, completeness and usefulness in the real world .
VC² aims to help students harness the technical knowledge of students' core disciplines, merge it with their inherent and learned creativity to achieve a focused outcome. It is designed to promote an entrepreneurial approach to life through the synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines to create useful and practical solutions to systematically address identified market gaps.
VC² is designed, therefore, to focus students on real problems, and to develop complex, nonlinear thinking to address these problems, using interdisciplinary capabilities through teamwork and practice. This approach enhances their thinking, judgment, and behavioral skills and capabilities, positioning them to engage their personal, business and community life in a wholesome manner.
Students will exit the class with an appreciation of entrepreneurship as a disciplined approach to solving challenging problems and being rewarded for it. They will also come out of this class with knowledge about philanthropy, the ultimate essence of entrepreneurial success.
PROGRAM DESIGN
VC² begins in the fall semester and runs through the spring semester. Students learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurship in the fall semester and put their knowledge to practice in the spring semester, building and managing a venture, an intended outcome of this course.
We have intentionally structured the program to be intensive and fast-paced so that students may develop strategic-thinking skills for purposeful action and achievement of objectives under pressure. This is the constant reality of entrepreneurs.
The course design also helps our students overcome the fear of failure, using it as experience to help them "do it better next time." Their success, on the other hand, builds their confidence and helps them move on to greater things. Thus, VC² is a laboratory where our students get to learn by actively doing.
The course uses three pedagogies: instruction, laboratories, and fire-pit sessions. We envisage two hours of instruction per week, where students learn not only concepts and theories of entrepreneurship but also how their disciplines fit together with entrepreneurship. Students spend one evening per month in fire-pit sessions. The fire-pit sessions involve live cases and conversations with experienced entrepreneurs and managers who may act as mentors for the young entrepreneurs. Each of these sessions is structured to address one of the eight steps in the VC² model: opportunity scoping, opportunity assessment, feasibility analysis, business planning, marshalling resources, practical strategic management, ethics and accountability, and philanthropy. Thus, students not only learn through instruction and doing, but also participate in conversations with people who have experienced-or are experiencing-some of the challenges and thrills we expect them to experience.
The lab session is where the students actually create products or services from their ideas that they eventually transform into ventures by the beginning of the spring semester. Although students are expected to spend a minimum of one hour per week on their venture projects, they will be encouraged to focus and work towards achieving their objective, investing all the time necessary to get the desired results. Students with bankable ventures will be presented to potential investors for financing consideration at the end of the course.
Students will work on their ventures in teams. Each student team is paired with a mentor in the community to help guide its venture creation process and the experiential component of their learning. The course organizers are in the process of identifying local entrepreneurs and business people who can mentor our students. We will also work with identified faculty in each participating student's department to provide the requisite academic supervision of the student's work in VC².
As part of the learning process, students will be required to publish a weekly blog on the course website, documenting their thinking, challenges, thrills, lessons and other experiences as they go through the course. These blogs will form an important component of the course content and help faculty advisors and students determine how they can enhance their support to achieve results.
Students will "pitch" their businesses to potential investors at the end of the spring semester. This will offer them the opportunity to receive advice, get direction for their business, and possibly secure financial support to move their ventures forward.