Within a day or two I will post students’ project ideas and an update on progress, but for this post I want to share some observations of the process over the past 2 weeks of classes.

My first observation and perhaps pearl of wisdom comes from student teamwork. I have taught arts entrepreneurship a number of times, but have not formed students into project teams before. Previously I formed students into groups to critique each other’s ideas and business plans. The reason I decided to form students into project groups was twofold. For one, numerous entrepreneurship writers, researchers and practitioners stress the importance of the executive team as a critical success element in venture creation. I wanted the students in this class to experience the challenges of working within a team to create a business plan. Two, I wanted to see how it would work as a pedagogical tool. In the past I had avoided this because I worried that some students would carry all the water and some would slough off. Now I will have the opportunity to weigh the plusses of students’ experiencing the challenges of teamwork v. the possibility of work imbalance. Ah, but isn’t this one of the most knotty challenges of teamwork?

My second observation is difficult to explain. The students are consistently balancing their venture creation plans between a class exercise and “real life.” Especially the team leaders, those whose ideas were chosen, see their ventures becoming realities; but the time allowed to get the work done is limited, so choices need to be made that contribute to the “real life” plan, but don’t fully get the job done. For example, one team is developing a plan to launch Finger Lakes Opera (FLO). They have devised (at my direction) an in-depth, multi-directional market feasibility plan. They will only have time (now) to execute one aspect of it. Managing this frustration, plus understanding that their results from executing only one aspect may yield inconclusive or misleading results is difficult.

So more soon –