Fostering Entrepreneurial 4M Mindsets, Methods, Models, and Milestones at UCF

Entrepreneurship education has been criticized for failing to articulate concepts and skills students need to promote career readiness and success. We address this criticism by elaborating a competency-based approach to entrepreneurship education being developed within the Blackstone LaunchPad network. Specifically, we contextualize mindsets and methods – “habits of the mind” and design thinking cycles (understanding-creating-evaluating-achieving) – within professional models and milestones practicing entrepreneurs commonly use to evaluate startup ventures and entrepreneurial talent. This approach directs students’ design thinking efforts (using mindsets and methods) through a sequence of key business model design challenges and developmental milestones that denote professional achievement. The result is a roadmap that entrepreneurship educators can use to orient, guide, and assess student and venture development. We hope that associating entrepreneurial mindsets, methods, models, and milestones in this way helps students understand the “game” they are playing, how to demonstrate competence, and how to achieve success.

Presented by Cameron Ford

• Clarifying Insights (and changes) from last year’s presentation
  • There is no such thing as an “Entrepreneurial Mindset”
    • Create our own assessment approach aligned with a career readiness mission
    • Play a game that creates a profile in 8 different dimensions
  • We confounded “how to think” with “what to think about”
    • Separate them
  • We need to align our stories to those used in professional practice
    • POSTER
    • Need dean, profs, and students to understand it and be able to explain it
    • Co-opt widely shared narratives from startup culture
  • We need more emphasis on achievement – what’s the quest?
    • Virtuous 
  • We need to position concept, venture, and career development as outcomes resulting from mindsets, methods, and models
    • Forces we impose on our students = 
• 4M Venn Diagram (and overlap with next)

• • Mindsets – Pymetrics
    • Personal Development
  • Methods – Design Thinking
    • Concept Development
  • Models – Where to start is a great blog post by Strategyzer
    • Venture Development
  • Milestones – Clarify how to score to make the game fun (TBD)
    • Career Development
    • Motivate engagement by “gamifying” milestone achievement

• Build an entrepreneurial culture with shared stories, experiences, and artifacts
  • SIMPLIFY the stories to be easier to share word of mouth

• A new set of 4 questions
  • What is?
  • What if?
  • What wows?
  • What works?

• • Strategizer blog post – Where to start
    • Embed business model canvas within Porter’s 5 Forces
    • You can get insight anywhere
  • When you work hard at something, and you suck at it, you give up

• Failure loops

• Giving you categories and vernacular for narrative framework and stories
• Q&A
• Is there a different pathway for the identity of different people?
  • Mindset
  • Habits of the mind
    • Individual differences that lead you to think one way or the other
    • Self-esteem high or low
  • Identify is different
    • Self-branding yourself
    • How you describe yourself
    • Are you an athlete? Funny? Entrepreneurial?
    • Worry that students don’t think that way about themselves
    • Low entrepreneurial intent, competence
  • The goal is for entrepreneurial identity to develop
  • Theme = without some success, why would anyone think they are good at something
    • Need to give them small things to feel successful with
    • Ex. 5-year-old learning recorder to start music
    • More time to give freshmen experiences
• Do you have examples of gamification and how they are doing it?
  • No, it’s the weakest part of my presentation
  • A student came up with levels of achievement – innovator/explorer/launcher
  • Tiers of achievement for reaching startup milestones
  • Give them merch, food, networking events with mentors, etc. as higher levels
  • Give them targets
  • If you help your peers in your class, then you can get points to cash them in
• It seems hard to find a middle ground between too much methodology to not enough. Have you thought about it?
  • It’s nice about the business model canvas is a holistic view of the firm
  • Keep the big picture in mind while working on your distribution model for example (+)
  • I have a class with 650 students in it who turn in 10 HW assignments on their customer discovery…
  • Always trying to bring them back to the value proposition to accumulate to the value prop
  • Recommend you keep reminding them
• Goal: Entrepreneurial Intention + Self-Efficacy (students are confident they can do it well)