MEE Sample Topics
Design Thinking for Idea Generation: How can we teach our students to create or identify new opportunities? Participants will be led through an exercise that allows them to practice one of the core tenets of design thinking—need-finding—using a design challenge related to entrepreneurship education and the students we teach today. Participants will prepare to work in teams under purposeful time constraints to develop new ideas that will enhance the entrepreneurship education experience of students today.
Entrepreneurial Finance: How can we help students understand the financial challenges associated with growing ventures and the potential impact they have on ideas, innovation, and confidence in decision making. We will explore and assess various tactics for teaching financial techniques for companies, examining the implications of strategy, marketing, and production decisions on finance. Participants will delve into the importance of investing and define the process and content that should be used by educators to explain business leaders’ decisions.
Entrepreneurial Thought & Action®: A Method of Entrepreneurship: Participants will be introduced to Babson’s strategic and unifying framework for entrepreneurship of all kinds—Entrepreneurial Thought and Action® (ET&A™). We will emphasize entrepreneurship as a way of thinking and acting that goes beyond the traditional discipline boundaries as we know them today. ET&A™ is an action-oriented method for navigating environments that are increasingly uncertain and unknown. Embedded within the ET&A™ methodology is a set of five “practices” of entrepreneurship education that students must develop over time to help them think and act more entrepreneurially—to create, find, and act on opportunities.
Family Entrepreneurship: Representing over 80% of all businesses in the U.S., and an even greater proportion in other parts of the world, family businesses are often overlooked when it comes to entrepreneurship education. While the family business form is common enough throughout the world, available resources for teaching students how to be entrepreneurial within this context are not. The Family Entrepreneurship module will draw on the resources of the Bertarelli Institute for Family Entrepreneurship. This module will explore the challenges and complexity of growth in the generational context of the family’s entrepreneurial legacies.
Opportunity Evaluation: In this session, we explore launching a venture as an iterative process. This approach combines both the creation and prediction aspects of ET&A to identify low-cost means of testing your opportunity, learning from the test, and then reshaping the opportunity to take the next, larger test.
Social entrepreneurship: Explore the opportunities and challenges of using your managerial skills and entrepreneurial talents creatively and appropriately to help solve social problems and to make a positive difference in the lives of others. Participants will focus on organizations with an explicit social purpose, most typically associated with the not-for-profit sector of the economy, but increasingly taking the form of for-profit organizations.
