Dear all,
For those of us who teach courses that push students to come up with innovative ideas, I think we are all familiar with students that get stuck in their thinking.
As we all know, there are a wide variety of paths to start identifying the ideas that form the basis for entrepreneurial opportunities or value creation. (I'm talking about just idea generation, not the exploitation stage!) Some people find themselves "at the right place at the right time," others accumulate valuable knowledge that condenses over time, and others deliberately scan, etc.
In my courses, I usually have a couple of early class periods devoted to group-based idea generation. In entrepreneurship, it's great to tackle something that one knows about, but in the earliest of stages, I also have wanted to teach my students how to free their mind.
Freeing the mind can lead to a bunch of nonsensical or strictly useless ideas, where vetting might not make sense in the first place. I wanted a tool that could guide students in freeing their mind productively, specifically by combining trend forecasts into ideas.
So, in 2010, I created a basic brainstorming game based on combining current (published) trend forecasts. The game design underwent a few iterations in the following years. It has always been a hit in class; even my most jaded students have appreciated it.
In 2015, I searched Amazon for "entrepreneurship & brainstorming & trends", and I got zero hits. So for kicks, I decided to self-publish my game book on Amazon focusing on Korean trends (since I'm based in Korea). In a nutshell, the game book lists 100+ trends, each numbered and in a small paragraph. Gameplay requires randomly receiving 3 trends drawn from a pool of trends, combining them into a business idea, and discussing the business idea with others in a small group. The game instructions are a tiny bit more detailed than that, and the game is fairly simple as is, so it can be used for even high school students. But there are very easy ways to make the game much more complicated and nuanced for the MBA crowd.
It was a pet project at the time, but since 2015, I've gotten a handful of VC-backed entrepreneurs telling me that I should expand the game book. They say that it would be useful beyond the classroom.
So, I'm looking for fellow faculty who teach venture creation courses that would like to co-publish future editions of the book with me. The time commitment, believe it or not, is minimal (anyways, this ain't P&T material!). At least, it involves enlisting students at the beginning of the semester to scan for and submit descriptions of trends, whereby those descriptions would be edited and included for the game.
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Chihmao Hsieh
Research Professor of Entrepreneurship
Founding Director, Center for Global Entrepreneurship
Department of Business Management
SUNY Stonybrook Korea