A traditional model of sitting in a classroom and listening to lectures is no longer the way to teach about entrepreneurship. The future is about experimenting and practicing.
“It’s like learning to ride a bike, you push the pedals, you fall, you get back up, you adjust and try again,” says Juris Ulmanis, Latvian-based co-founder of global entrepreneurship educational platform Experiential Simulations. Students in the program learn how to be entrepreneurs by behaving like them.
A former senior manager at Motorola and founder of two companies, Ulmanis has been a university professor teaching entrepreneurship in Latvia, Germany, Poland, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark for the past decade.
“Typically, what happens is teachers have their students write business plans. I used to do this all the time, but it was a waste of time. Teaching by writing business plans is not realistic; it is just a guess, not based on facts.”
The program, which is made up of 18 rounds, takes students on a journey through a stimulation that challenges them with multiple business variables and demonstrates how every decision can cost time or money.
“The purpose is to give the sense of reality, and a birds-eye view of the marketplace in a way that a classroom can’t do. You can talk about it in a classroom, but you can’t experience it. The simulation is not real life, but is as close to real life as we can make it,” says Ulmanis.
He believes that education is one of the most important parts of global economy. “If you teach entrepreneurship, it should be measurable; how many of your students were able to go out into the world and create successful businesses for themselves?”
For more informationread on at http://www.forbes.com/sites/alisoncoleman/2014/08/17/lessons-in-entrepreneurship-think-globally-use-your-own-cash-and-learn-by-doing/
via Jason Grill http://jasongrill.org/experiential-learning-key-to-entrepreneurial-success/
Jason Grill 