Dear all,
So, I had an interesting experience/revelation yesterday that I thought I'd share.
In my Entrepreneurial Finance course, my students were in groups discussing their ventures. This isn't an experiential venture creation course (we have our capstone course for that) but they still need to frame their venture idea in the context of different financing strategies.
It's a 3-hour class period, and I had asked them to get into groups to prep a practice pitch. We were going to do one practice pitch, have in-class discussion, and then re-pitch.
About one hour into the period, one of my teams made a breakthrough. And as I was walking by them, I exclaimed that if they were serious, I would invest. And then I said, out of the blue, "Hey, call up one of your parents, see whether they'd invest!" The students on that team were a bit incredulous. "Call them now? In the middle of their work day? From class?" And I said, "yeah, as long as you think they might have 5 minutes to talk". "Tell them you're in class, your professor asked you to call, and put them on speakerphone, so that your teammates can listen in," I said.
And the team made the call.
As word got around the classroom that a team was calling a parent to pitch, I started going up to all the teams and asking them to make similar conference calls. And before I knew it, there were multiple calls going on at the same time. The class was buzzing, a kind of boiler room energy. Some of these "conference cold calls" lasted 30+ minutes. I got comments from parents that they had rarely felt so connected to their kids academically. And some parents even said they'd invest.
I can imagine that some entrepreneurship professors likely have this kind of exercise built in: Pitch to parents. But this version was something I've never heard about. This was (a) an unannounced exercise, and (b) it was in-class. The looks of disbelief and satisfaction were everywhere after pitches were over yesterday.
We teach our students about all the financing sources in our entrepreneurship classes. And we tell them about FFF. But a simple *in-class* conference call revealed a shared learning opportunity to go one step further, and unleashed a special class-wide enthusiasm I've never seen before.
Cheers, -chihmao.