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Tools & methods

Short entrepreneurial exercises

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Simple, easy to facilitate drills to warm students up.

These simple exercises are doable in a short time and require very little preparation or facilitation. Use them to introduce students to entrepreneurial thinking, or simply as a warm-up early into the lecture.


Alternative uses for a paper clip

Provide student groups with a paper clip and give them one minute to list alternative uses for it. The exercise is a good warm-up for ideation, and the follow-up discussion helps them to understand that they could have thought even more outside the box.

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Draw an alien

Ask students to draw an alien in 5 minutes. This exercise is about structured imagination: most students will draw something that resembles existing beings. Students will learn that people are restricted by existing things, and that imagining something nonexistent is difficult.

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30 circles challenge

Ask students to fill as many empty circles as they can with recognizable objects in 3 minutes. The catch: the circle must be a part of the drawing. Students will realize there were many hidden assumptions, and that the circles can be used a lot more creatively than they thought.

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