I'm sharing this TED talk because of the last few sentences spoken by Lisa Bu. To paraphrase, she says that the purpose of aspirational dreams, whether they come true or not, are to reveal what makes us happy and to help us find the source of what can bring purpose to our lives. I find this thought provoking observation to contain some truth because it means people can analyze these dreams in order to understand why they aspire in certain directions. This type of aspiration based analysis should reveal our inner standards for happiness and purpose.
Enhancing Entrepreneurial Learning
The moment everyone's been waiting for, the final draft of my thesis is finally available through issuu. Check it out!
Enhancing Entrepreneurial Learning: Designing a System that better enables knowledge and experience transfer from business mentor to entrepreneur
Enhancing Entrepreneurial Learning: Designing a System that better enables knowledge and experience transfer from business mentor to entrepreneur
Thesis Defense: Enhancing Entrepreneurial Learning
The following slideshare is my master's thesis defense. Even though there's 51 slides, the run time was roughly 12 minutes.
After presenting the mentor system
during my thesis defense, I received feedback on two major areas of
the system that will help guide its development. The first area is
learning for the entrepreneur and the second area is determining the
outcome of the mentor system.
One of the challenges of the mentor
system is measuring the actual learning that is going on within the
mentoring session. For the entrepreneur, the learning occurring
during these mentoring sessions is dependent on their stage – idea
stage, launch stage, or operating business stage. As part of the
design for the mentor system, the system needs a set of metrics for
measuring the appropriate skills for each of these stages. Measuring
these basic competencies for each stage, while the entrepreneur has
progressed from the idea stage to launch stage and finally to an
operating business, will determine whether the learning will actually
result in an increased business success. In other words, the
entrepreneur will be making less mistakes.
As a part of learning from a mentor and
having discussions and feedback, the entrepreneur should make less
mistakes over time. Being able to know when an entrepreneur changes
their mind from going down one road to another can be one indicator
of learning. Another indicator is measuring for the conversational
themes. If these conversational themes were present within the
mentoring conversation, then the precursor for learning is present.
However, without measuring entrepreneurial behavior we can not be
certain if learning took place. For example, if we look at a
classroom full of math students, we can measure how they are learning
by testing them against a set of standards. We begin with an entry
exam, to see how much they know on the subject. The lesson is taught
and a second exam is administered on the same subject. If fewer
mistakes were made, it's assumed that learning has occurred during
the lesson. I think this same example can be applied to
entrepreneurship in the sense that learning is measured over time,
not with a single set of questions. A reduction in mistakes can not
be measured by a single exam. Obviously, asking entrepreneurs to take
a single survey as they are starting their businesses is not the
right way to go about measuring learning. Finding the appropriate
mechanism for this will take some time and will guide the development
of this project over the next few months. I think this feedback will
effect the follow-up section of the mentor system by determining the
questions that need to be asked.
The second area of thesis committee
feedback is determining the outcome of the mentor system. This means
that I need to explicitly communicate the value this system delivers
to its different audiences – entrepreneurs, mentors, and local
mentoring organizations. This ties directly with the value
proposition because it will determine the expectations of each
audience before they use the mentor system. At the moment, it seems
the best course of action is to go directly to the users in order to
determine what the mentor system should accomplish. If we look at
entrepreneurs, we realize they want a successful business. Non-profit
local mentoring organizations want to help more entrepreneurs because
they receive federal funding that requires them to help as many
entrepreneurs that seek them out. Mentors want to be able to give
back and see an eventual impact as a result of their mentoring. The
needs and wants of these three different intersect at helping
entrepreneurs start and continue to operate sustainable businesses.
At this intersect, I believe we can define the outcome for the mentor
system.
Why 30 is not the new 20 by Meg Jay
A beautiful talk by Meg Jay about the importance of not wasting your 20s.
Publication: LRI & MiD
The following publication recounts the experiences of my colleagues and myself while we were collaborating with Liberty Resources to design for disability.
Publication: Mall Futures
Mall Futures is a design project a few colleagues and I worked. Here's the publication.
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