e.school Start-Up Incubator ideation session: “What do you want? What have you got?” (QAA 1,2,3, 6 , 7) #FEEUK

Group Size ? 1.) Small group (teams of 4-6)
2.) Individual Task
3.) Large Group
4.) Any
Small group (teams of 4-6)

Learning Environment ? 1.) Lecture Theatre
2.) Presentation Space
3.) Carousel Tables (small working group)
4.) Any
5.) Outside
6.) Special
Presentation Space

QAA Enterprise Theme(s) ? 1.) Creativity and Innovation
2.) Opportunity recognition, creation and evaluation
3.) Decision making supported by critical analysis and judgement
4.) Implementation of ideas through leadership and management
5.) Reflection and Action
6.) Interpersonal Skills
7.) Communication and Strategy
1Creativity and Innovation 2Opportunity recognition‚ creation and evaluation 3Decision making supported by critical analysis and judgement 6Interpersonal Skills 7Communication and Strategy

Objective:

To support the idea generation/refinement process of aspiring student/graduate entrepreneurs

Introduction:

I aimed to design and deliver a reusable session,allowing every participant to develop and refine their ideas and for the group to create a mutually supportive network.
Any student/graduate who wished to work with (or was already working with) e.schoolwas invited for a whole morning session (with a really good breakfast and lunch thrown in).
Participants with existing start-ups were encouraged to develop new ideas if their business was considerably beyond the ideation stage.
My measure of success was two-fold: did participants continue to work with e.school, and did they work together following the session?

Activity:

The session beginswith a pre-activity breakfast and ends with a post-activity lunch. In between, the morning is divided into two halves. After breakfast, I start the morning by explaining how ideation fits into the start-up process and could be the first step in their work with e.school(see the images from two sessions below).
Part 1 (What Do You Want?) begins with an exercise that participants complete individually toarticulate what they want to achieve as entrepreneurs.
Certain obvious responses are banned (e.g. to get rich, be creative, be my own boss, etc.) with participants instead listing the kinds of people they want to work with or sell to or listing the problems they want to solve and who they want to solve those problems for.
Participants are then asked to make a second list of the kinds of people they feel comfortable working with or selling to.
Asimple Venn diagram exercise allows participants to identify any individuals or groups who appear on both lists and select one of them to work with
Where nosingle person/group is in the middle of the Venn diagram, participants must selectone from each listfor the time being.
In a small team (or teams), participants explain who they want to work with and why they want to work with them.
Through open questions and discussion, the team identified the product/service they believed would benefit the target group and what it would take to bring that to market.
Discussion sessionsare heavily time-restricted to focus participants on only the most obvious ideas, as this session is about learning an ideation process rather than finalising a product or service.
Participants unable to narrow their choice to a single person/group in the Venn diagram stage will see other team members go through the process before making their final choice of target audience for discussion.
Recording everything on flip-charts (or, in an online setting, MS Whiteboard, Padlet, Mentimeter, etc.) can be completed by the facilitator where there is a single team or team members where there are multiple teams.
Once each participant has settled on a target market and product/service, pause for a break.
During the break,display each flip chart and invite participants to attach post-it notes whenever an idea or question pops into their heads (there is an example image below).
Part 2 (What Have You Got?) begins with another individual exercise. Participants list all the resources they could bring to their business. Example questionscan guide this thought process: “How much time/energy/money/physical space are you willing to invest knowing that it could all be wasted?” “Who can you bring in to help, and what can they offer? What would they expect in return?” “Is there anything you have that would be okay to begin with but would need to be quickly improved on?” etc.
In a small team (or teams), participants compare their lists to try and identify pairs or trios with complementary resources (e.g. Participant 1 has money but no time or space, Participant 2 only has time, Participant 3 has a lot of available space).
Teams are invited to consider collaborating on a single project together or undertake a ‘swap’ where they could supplement the deficits in one another’s available resources.
To close, turn attention back to the flipcharts from Part 1. Each participant now has one idea and resource list and the potential to collaborate with one or more colleagues on a shared project.
Discussions on what to do with these potential ideas should continue over lunch (we usually bring in pizzas to eat with the flipcharts in sight).

Impact:

This session has been completed three times so far with different cohorts. Likert scale and narrative feedback were employed in a post-participation online (anonymised survey). Average scores across the groups demonstrate the achievement of our initial aims: I will continue working with e.school (4.94/5), I will continue working with one or more of my team (4.44/5), and I would recommend this session (4.89/5).
Among the narrative feedback was a sentence that became our tagline for the session (“I would never have believed it was so easy to create something I really want to do”).
Participants have formally registered thirteen businesses, three co-owned by multiple participants.
All participants have continued working with e.school following the session they attended.
Among the innovative collaborations from the sessions are a Slam Poet, Breakdancer, and Digital Marketer, who have separate businesses but have worked together to present sessions funded by local secondary schools.
Another organisation secured funding from a global bank and a mobile phone network to provide mobile phones to local homeless people, enabling them to connect or reconnect with support networks and family and maintain access to universal credit or other welfare payments.
As a teaching tool, the key to the success of the sessions was that everyone felt empowered to contribute authentically. The solo activity, then group discussion format and limited ‘trainer with a whiteboard’ structure of the mornings completely equalised the setting and removed the traditional tutor/student hierarchy. I treated the participants with the same esteem as the business leaders I work with as a consultant, visibly enhancing their confidence and self-efficacy.

Resources:

Flipchart paper and pens (or the digital equivalent)
Post-it notes and pens
Food (optional, I suppose, but I found that itreally helped to break down barriers among strangers)
High energy and a completely open mind (the only absolutely essentialresources!)

Pictures or Images:

References:

About the Author
This guide was produced by Ian Fellows (Senior Lecturer in Enterprise and Employability, Birmingham Newman University).