This course uses a GroupMe account for sending and responding to questions and issues related to the class. I absolutely recommend that you sign up for it because you can communicate with me in real time during the winter session instead of waiting for me to read an email. This GroupMe account is intended ONLY for students enrolled in this course. You'll receive a link to join by email before winter session begins.
This course focuses on applying entrepreneurship to solve grand challenges. In the specific case, students identify, unpack, and attempt to solve through entrepreneurship big challenges in dealing with an aging population. We all know that the globe's population is rising and that people are living longer than ever before. We need to find new solutions for lingering or "wicked" problems that an aging population poses, and we need to think about how aging people can continue to participate in the economy if they want.
I was recognized by the International Small Business Council in Berlin last July as a finalist for Global Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year in part for this course. I teach this course because I believe young people who learn the proper skills and who are sufficiently motivated are the people who will solve our world's biggest challenges. I hope you gain confidence in thinking about solving global problems and learn some important skills that will help you be a competent entrepreneur.
I will use this site for all content and assignments for this course. You can find occasional updates to your grades on the Blackboard site for this course. You will use my email account created espressly for this course - Ent4GrandChallenges@gmail.com - for all course communications. If you joined this course AFTER December 9, you must notify me of your doing so by emailing me at Ent4GrandChallenges@gmail.com so I can add you to the course emailing list.
This course officially begins on December 16 and ends exactly at midnight, January 7.
Module 0
Quiz on context of aging in the US for entrepreneurship (5, 5)
Module 1
Identify problems associated with an aging US population (10, 15)
Module 2
Unpack your problem (5, 20)
Connect the dots (5, 25)
Persona (5, 30)
Map activity (10, 40)
Solution sketch (5, 45)
Module 3
Thinking Quiz (5, 50)
Module 4
Evaluate a pitch (5, 55)
Write out your pitch (10, 65)
Module 5
Quiz on organizing for growth and sustainability (5, 70)
Test Card for Experiments (10, 80)
Lean canvas assignment (10, 90)
Module 5
Reflection on your learning (10, 100)
All entrepreneurial opportunities are situations in which an entrepreneur perceives a problem for which s/he can develop a solution that is valuable to a constituency of customers. The CONTEXT for this course’s activities focuses on aging in the US. This “context” section provides you with readings and activities that are intended to help you think about situations involving an aging population where you could make an improvement - and that improvement could serve as the basis for a new venture.
Ideas? What are some unique problems that are starting to unfold - or have already manifested themselves fully - in the domain of aging? Becoming an entrepreneur after the age of 50 is one; what training, support, and institutions do these entrepreneurs need? But I think the bigger opportunities await for entrepreneurs like you who are watching and anticipating “age wave” changes to our economy, housing, healthcare, family care, travel, and education. Maybe even design of cities.
There is a quiz that follows these readings. You might want to check the quiz first. You can open it and see what the questions are before you start your reading and still come back to it later. That's called preparation. What I really want you to come away with for this section is a great deal of empathy for older people and insights for ideas to help them.
Required Readings
Pdf: 10 innovations from around the world to help deal with an aging population.
pdf: What old age might look like for today’s 30-year-olds
What about adult children of retired Boomers? Read MSN.com, Baby Boomers are Aging: Their Kids Aren't Ready
and consider this list of 10 topics I created for you to help you start thinking about a few good ideas to develop in this course:
Technology-enabled home care: Develop user-friendly mobile apps or voice-activated systems for seniors to manage medications, connect with family/care providers, schedule appointments, or access entertainment/information. Focus on intuitive interfaces and security.
Age-friendly home remodeling: Offer specialized renovation services to adapt homes for increased accessibility and safety. This could include installing grab bars, ramps, wider doorways, slip-resistant flooring, and smart home technology for managing lights and temperatures.
Personalized health and wellness services: Provide customized fitness programs, nutrition consultations, chronic disease management support, or mental health therapy specifically tailored to the needs and preferences of older adults. Consider telehealth options for accessibility.
Social engagement and entertainment platforms: Create online communities or physical activity groups catered to seniors looking for connection, socialization, and leisure activities. This could involve book clubs, travel groups, virtual tours, or skill-sharing workshops.
Senior transportation solutions: Offer on-demand or scheduled transportation services for seniors who no longer drive or need assistance with errands, appointments, or social outings. Consider utilizing electric vehicles or partnerships with existing ride-sharing platforms.
Financial planning and eldercare consulting: Provide specialized financial advice for seniors managing retirement income, navigating long-term care options, and estate planning. Partner with legal and healthcare professionals for holistic guidance.
Intergenerational living communities: Develop co-housing models or shared living spaces where different generations live together, providing companionship and support for seniors while offering younger generations affordable housing options.
Upskilling and reskilling programs: Design learning experiences for seniors looking to stay mentally active, acquire new skills, or re-enter the workforce. Offer online courses, workshops, or mentorship programs on topics like technology, entrepreneurship, or creative pursuits.
Pet care and pet therapy services: Provide in-home pet care, walking, or pet therapy services for seniors who want to maintain companionship with their pets but need assistance with their care. Consider offering pet adoption/fostering options for social interaction.
Mental health and cognitive stimulation services: Develop games, apps, or activities that promote cognitive health, memory improvement, and mental well-being for seniors facing the risk of dementia or cognitive decline. Consider gamification and engaging interfaces.
An aging population like ours in the U.S. has an enormous variety of problems. Instead of viewing them as problems, entrepreneurs look at them as entrepreneurial opportunities - situations where an entrepreneur can create an improvement to help a group of people.
Remember, these are just ideas, and the most successful ventures will be those that deeply understand the specific needs and preferences of the target demographics within the aging population. Research, empathy, and user-centric design are key to making a positive impact and building a sustainable business.
Graded assignment: Quiz on the context of Aging in Entrepreneurship (<-- click on the link to google form for quiz)(5 points)
Supplemental readings (all short reads for more insights into the aging phenomenon; take notes for later modules; you should think of this list of readings as a "sampler" where you decide what looks interesting to you and start exploring there; move on to related articles or others that looking interesting. also I am looking for more articles to supplement or replace these article, so pass some good ones my way)
Ausubel, J. 2020. Older people are more likely to live alone in the U.S. than elsewhere in the world. Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/10/older-people-are-more-likely-to-live-alone-in-the-u-s-than-elsewhere-in-the-world/.
Cohn D., Horowitz, J.M., Minkin, R., Fry, R. & Hurst, K. 2022. Financial Issues Top the List of Reasons U.S. Adults Live in Multigenerational Homes: Nearly four-in-ten men ages 25 to 29 now live with older relatives. Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/03/24/financial-issues-top-the-list-of-reasons-u-s-adults-live-in-multigenerational-homes/.
Faverio, M. 2022. Share of those 65 and older who are tech users has grown in the past decade. Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/13/share-of-those-65-and-older-who-are-tech-users-has-grown-in-the-past-decade/.
Fry, R. 2020. The pace of Boomer retirements has accelerated in the past year. Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/09/the-pace-of-boomer-retirements-has-accelerated-in-the-past-year/.
Fry, R. 2021. Amid the pandemic, a rising share of older U.S. adults are now retired. Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-the-pandemic-a-rising-share-of-older-u-s-adults-are-now-retired/.
Fry, R. 2022. Young adults in U.S. are much more likely than 50 years ago to be living in a multigenerational household. Pew Research Center., https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/07/20/young-adults-in-u-s-are-much-more-likely-than-50-years-ago-to-be-living-in-a-multigenerational-household/
Fuscaldo, D. 2022. 7 Purchases Retirees Often Regret. AARP. https://www.aarp.org/retirement/planning-for-retirement/info-2022/purchases-retirees-often-regret.html.
Livingston, G. 2019. On average, older adults spend over half their waking hours alone. Pew Research Center. Retrieved December 13, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/03/on-average-older-adults-spend-over-half-their-waking-hours-alone/.
Livingston, G. 2019. Americans 60 and older are spending more time in front of their screens than a decade ago. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/18/americans-60-and-older-are-spending-more-time-in-front-of-their-screens-than-a-decade-ago/.
McGowan, K. 2024, January 4. My Parents’ Dementia Felt Like the End of Joy. Then Came the Robots. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/parents-dementia-robots-warm-technology/.
Poleg, D. 2022. The Middle Class Is Dead. Long Live the Long Tail Class. DrorPoleg.com, https://www.drorpoleg.com/the-middle-class-is-dead-long-live-the-long-tail-class/.
I intend no offense to any of you with what I am about to say, yet I say it because it’s true. Most of you are good at solving problems that have already been structured for you to discover the “right answer.” This is the way most of our education system approaches problems, and it’s a useful skill to recognize the type of problem and to know what approach or technique to apply when you are confronted with that particular type of problem. In fact, it’s a pretty valuable skill to have. If you can recognize what type of problem you are trying to solve, the solution seems to logically present itself.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” - Albert Einstein
This seems kind of important, this skill to recognize and organize problems. But even on google scholar the literature seems disjointed and rather abstract. That makes it harder to shape into a set of lectures or to build a course around the topic.
In this segment of the course you’ll learn about different ways to think about problems. Obvious problems tend to attract a lot of people who claim to have brilliant solutions to them; should you try to advance your idea to solve that problem in a crowded space? Other problems are far less obvious or are ill-structured or difficult to address with a market-based solution. This segment will help you think about problems like experienced entrepreneurs.
Graham (2005, 2012) on problems (Paul Graham is one of my favorite entrepreneurship thinkers)
The Jobs to Be Done framework (my google site)
Identify problems associated with an aging US population - click on this link to access (10 points) Submit your assignment using this google form.
For the rest of this course you will be working with ONE PROBLEM you identified in the previous activity. Think of the problem as a tool that you can use to gain greater insights into the problem / situation. Plus, the tool, like the problem or idea, can evolve into something else if that's where it takes you. You can start working on a different idea if your exploration of your problem / opportunity takes you in new directions.
After reading the contextual materials on aging, you probably think we just have a bunch of problems to deal with…unless you’re an entrepreneur. THEN you will have the tendency to see problems as opportunities to sell your innovative and valuable solutions. In this section we cover some of these questions: What are opportunities? What is entrepreneurship?
Opportunities and Entrepreneurs (my google slides)
Unpack your problem (5 points) Submit your completed assignment using this google form.
Connect the dots activity - this is the step where you should combine your readings from above with new information related to or unrelated to problem situation to be as fluent in writing attributes as possible (5 points) Instructions for submitting this assignment are on the connect the dots activity page; you'll need to navigate back here when you're done.
Persona (5 points), Instructions for submitting this assignment are on the customer persona activity page; you'll need to navigate back here when you're done.
Map activity (10 points), Instructions for submitting this assignment are on the map activity page; you'll need to navigate back here when you're done.
Solution sketch (5 points) Instructions for submitting this assignment are on the Solution Sketch page; you'll need to navigate back here when you're done.
"To understand is to know what to do" - Wittgenstein
First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge - Farnam Street (Parrish, n.d.)
Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform (Parrish, 2016). “Often when we solve one problem, we end up unintentionally creating another one that’s even worse. The best way to examine the long-term consequences of our decisions is to use second-order thinking.”
Design Thinking
Design Thinking (google doc by me)
Design Thinking - Lessons from IDEO and Stanford’s D School (browse these google slides by me). There are a lot of ideas presented in this deck that go far beyond "thinking," such as instructions for how to create an early prototype, so please browse the entire deck.
Lewrick, M., Link, P., & Leifer, L. (2020). The design thinking toolbox: A guide to mastering the most popular and valuable innovation methods. John Wiley & Sons. (browse this full book to the extent that it holds your interest. There are no quiz questions from this reading, but you should consider it to be a bookshelf item to help you in the future)
Systems Thinking
Mental Models (google site by me; you don’t need to do the graded assignment)
Quiz on Thinking (5* points), covering the First Principles reading and the slide deck on Design Thinking: Lessons from IDEO and Stanford's D School. * Sorry, I originally had mistakenly entered 10. It's 5.
You’re not making a sales pitch because you’re not selling to customers. Long before you get to that stage - and only if you work smart and are maybe a bit lucky - you need to convince resource providers that your idea is a valuable solution to a big problem and that you are the right person to pursue it. The entrepreneurial pitch is a spoken act of educating, hypothesizing, and persuading the audience, whom you will ask for resources to back the venture you will create to pursue the opportunity you're pitching.
You’re always going to be pitching. Your audience could be the budget people whom you must convince in order to finance your project. Or the audience could be friends and family who already know you well but need to get a better understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve and how your solution is better than what people are currently using before they lend you money. Other audiences can include angel investors, groups of angels, venture capital investors, pitching and business plan competition judges, or even bankers.
Armstrong, C.E. 2020. How to Pitch (google slides) Big pain, brilliant solution, differentiation, why you, call to action
Williams, L. 2016. Making a disruptive pitch: Underprepare the obvious, overprepare the unusual. In Disrupt: Think the unthinkable to spark transformation in your business. 2nd Edition, Pearson Education, pp. 143-170 (Google doc) a slightly different perspective on how to approach your pitching process
Evaluate a pitch (pick this one or this one, but NOT both) You'll view a video and read a written pitch for the opportunity on a google form and then answer a few questions on the same form. You'll submit that single form to complete this assignment. (5 points)
Write out your pitch: The big pain you want to solve becomes a pitch with a simple template (10 points); I encourage you to use Google Bard or ChatGTP to see how they can help you write a great pitch. See this example on a pitch to help the elderly with dental hygiene. Submit your written pitch file through this google form.
Assume you receive the funding you need to start achieving some new milestones in your new venture. The money you raised from investors will be used to develop IP, hire more specialists, or build a brand. Your new venture idea based on an aging population might produce a substantial amount of value for everyone: customers (the aging or those who serve them), investors, employees… In this section I will lead you through some activities new ventures conduct once they have a clearer path toward what they want to achieve.
Thiel’s seven questions every business must answer
Kromatic, 2021: The Real Startup Book (browse this for customer and product development techniques; focus on Chapter 4, Hypothesis Checklist; it’s required)
Maurya A. 2012. Running Lean, 2nd Ed., Cambridge, MA: O’Reilly Media. (REQUIRED READ Chapter 5, pages 57-68; your “organizing for growth activity” is based in part on this chapter. In my opinion this is the best book for covering how to start a startup; here's a short overview of the contents of "Running Lean")
Ries, E. 2011. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business. (browse)
Organizing for growth (google slides, in progress, so suggested not required)
“How to use the business model canvas the right way” (in progress, the Maurya text describes a lean canvas, which is different from the BM canvas. Sorry, no slides on this available yet)
Organizing for growth activity - Test Card for Experiments (10 points) (google form; complete the required readings above first; follow the instructions, complete the questions, submit) This activity is described in the Kromatic Real Startup Book
Lean Canvas Assignment (10 points) - USE THIS LINK TO SUBMIT THE Lean Canvas DOC OR PDF.
Reflecting on your experiences is one of the best ways to learn from those experiences. Thinking and writing about your experience helps you to put it in context and incorporate that experience into your long-term learning and can actually make it more likely that you’ll participate in that activity later on (Kassean, Vanevenhoven, Liguori, & Winkel, 2015).
Use this google form to submit your reflection notes. (10 points; ready for action now!)
Graham, P. (2005). Ideas for Startups. http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
Graham, P. (2012, November). How to Get Startup Ideas. PaulGraham.Com. http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Kassean, H., Vanevenhoven, J., Liguori, E., & Winkel, D. E. (2015). Entrepreneurship education: a need for reflection, real-world experience and action. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 21(5), 690–708. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-07-2014-0123
Knapp, J., Zeratsky, J., & Kowitz, B. (2016). Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Simon and Schuster.
Parrish, S. (2016, April 12). Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform. Farnam Street. https://fs.blog/second-order-thinking/
Parrish, S. (n.d.). First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge - Farnam Street [Fs.blog]. Farnam Street. https://fs.blog/first-principles/
Thiel, P. A. (2014). Zero to one: Notes on startups, or how to build the future / Peter Thiel with Blake Masters. Crown Business.