The Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division and Yeshiva University are delighted to introduce the winners of Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award for year 2021:
Joshua Gans, University of Toronto
Erin L Scott, MIT Sloan School of Management
Scott Stern, MIT Sloan
For their course entitled:
Entrepreneurial Strategy
Course description:
Entrepreneurial Strategy offers a choice-based approach to entrepreneurial education and practice. First developed at MIT and the University of Toronto, the course provides a deep understanding of the core strategic choices facing innovation-based entrepreneurs and a synthetic framework for the process of choosing and implementing an overall entrepreneurial strategy. A central theme of the course is that founders must balance the experimentation and learning inherent to entrepreneurship with the choices necessary to go from idea to impact.
The course begins with a focus on four key domains of choice that are central to the process of value creation and capture: customer (who should you choose as your first customer?), technology (what technologies will you adopt and where will you innovate?), organization (how can you choose your initial team and build over time), and competition (with whom and how will you compete?), and offers a systematic framework for how to undertake learning and experimentation in each of these domains without inadvertently committing the venture to a particular path. The second half of the course addresses how these choices fit together as part of overall go-to-market strategies using the Entrepreneurial Strategy Compass. The Compass focuses on the distinctive directions an entrepreneur can choose to realize the value of their idea, highlighting four key strategic paths and how to navigate among them. Each strategy represents a distinctive set of choices regarding customer, technology, organization, and competition that students are able to readily apply to their own startup ideas using the Entrepreneurial Strategy Canvas.
The full teaching suite – draft textbook (forthcoming from Norton), 18 custom teaching cases, lecture slides, sample syllabi, and workbook materials – are available for instructors on our website, www.entrepreneurial-strategy.net. It includes teaching materials for the Entrepreneurial Strategy course as well as a broader Introduction to Entrepreneurship course. These courses have been adopted at business and engineering schools at both the undergraduate and master’s level, and many faculty have integrated the materials into their established entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology strategy courses. Please reach out to Erin L Scott (elscott@mit.edu) if you would like to discuss how to tailor the materials to your program!
Short description of the Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award
The purpose of the award is to encourage not only innovations in pedagogy, but also the dissemination of such innovations. Criteria for evaluation of nominations included (1.) the innovativeness and novelty of the content and pedagogical process; (2.) the demonstrated and potential impact and transferability; and (3.) the course’s relevance (e.g., actionable lessons for entrepreneurs, addresses a social need).
The teaching committee would like to thank all participants for putting together excellent proposals! Our jury members were impressed by the quality of the material presented and we are proud to see that our Division members are nurturing future entrepreneurs through their teaching curricula.