Products and Markets is not a new course at Olin, but it has undergone some big changes. How did we know the course needed to evolve? Simple. We listened to the market–our students.
By Lawrence Neeley, Associate Professor, Olin College Of Engineering
Engineering student Gracey Wilson is working on experiments at Olin College that have nothing to do with a test tube, an electrical circuit, or the structure of a model bridge. Gracey’s series of experiments are being conducted in an introductory entrepreneurship class called Products and Markets. This is a core course I have taught together with Jason Woodard, Associate Professor of Design and Entrepreneurship; Caitrin Lynch, Associate Professor of Anthropology; and Joanne Pratt, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences. Products and Markets is the first of Olin’s three course entrepreneurship series.
For the first six weeks of the ten-week course, Gracey and other first-year engineering students in the class sprinted through three independent experiments, each two weeks long. The students created, refined, and executed plans. They created prototypes, which took their ideas from theory to practice in the real world. Then they went back for analysis, improvement, and refinement.
The idea to frame the activity as an experiment and not as a project is intentional. A project is often viewed by students as something to tackle and finish. By crafting the assignments as experiments, students are encouraged to come up with an idea and test their hypothesis. In other words, HEAR: hypothesize, experiment, analyze, repeat.
Having built and honed their skills over three self-contained experiments, the students are ready for the last and most intense four-week long project, which consists of two connected experimental sprints.
Gracey is part of a team that has come up with a tutoring service to provide technical help to older people who may want to keep up with friends and family on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone but lack the technical skills to do so. The team is embarking on user tests to find the greatest areas of opportunity in their market, and they have already found a client through another Olin class. The students have conducted tutoring sessions and created laminated “cheat sheet” cards for their client that show step-by-step instructions on how to text. The team is also exploring a partnership with consumer electronics corporations, such as Best Buy, in the interest of joining their tutoring services with already-existing purchase packages.
During the semester, we randomized teams for all four experiments. We did this by putting everyone’s name into a spreadsheet and creating a “random team generator.” We actually ran the algorithm in the front of the auditorium so the students could see that it indeed was random. We have learned that this kind of transparency is critical. We expect the same transparency from our students.
The schedule for each experiment includes a planning day, work and advising days, and a review/retrospective day. Every other Tuesday, students have time to get off campus and meet with potential customers and users.
In years past, the students in Products and Markets worked on one long project, lasting 10 weeks. As part of Olin’s culture, we received and actively encouraged comments from students about how they were experiencing the course. Students expressed that on one hand, the time felt too long for a class project. On the other, the time was too short to do something real and substantial. In both cases, we could see that students were feeling frustrated and more importantly, didn’t feel like they were maximizing their learning. We could see they were wrestling with important aspects of the course, so we hit the reset button. Although we knew they were learning, they needed a mechanism to see that they were learning.
In part, this effort is a result of a KEEN-driven recognition that fostering an entrepreneurial mindset in students is critical. Education that integrates entrepreneurially minded learning should focus on developing people rather than products, and behaviors rather than businesses. A revision was needed. The goal in Products and Markets is to give students appropriately structured experiences to help them develop the mindset, inclusive of entrepreneurial curiosity, and the methods and resources needed to act on their entrepreneurial ideas and interests.
Fast forward to how Gracey experienced the course. Instead of one long project, students are now working through experiments that are framed as self-contained sprints. Each experiment has different constraints and emphasizes different learning outcomes. One after another, they build upon skills developed in the previous experiments, but all of the experiments share an overall structure.
In one of Gracey’s experiments that focused on a product-market fit, the team looked into the struggles of recycling on college campuses. They explored what would make the process both easier and more efficient. Gracey said, “We talked to students at several colleges about their current recycling habits and what motivates them to recycle. We observed what happened when we designed and displayed signage around trash bins, and offered monetary compensation for recycling in an effort to understand how we can increase motivation.”
Our faculty team continued its practice of a mid-point feedback session. At the beginning of the course in January, we declared to the students that the course itself was an experiment because it was so new. It turned out the students were more forgiving, rather than less in their feedback. We also gave them the power to change things mid-semester and encouraged them to offer reflection and feedback in real-time. So far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive – looks like our course experiment is shaping up to be a success!
A special thanks to Anne-Marie Dorning, director of content development at Olin College of Engineering, for her collaboration in writing this article.