The European Entrepreneurship Colloquium 2010 held on IESE's Barcelona campus wrapped up on Friday after a week of sessions from a wide range of top professionals. The program opened with a discussion by Mike Roberts of Harvard Business School titled "What is entrepreneurship and what is participant learning?"
In a session on the following day, Roberts led an interactive discussion on writing case studies. He said the learning objectives must come first, and then the case, because trying to extrapolate learning objectives from a case generally doesn't work. You need to decide in advance what you want students to do with the data and what conclusions you want them to reach. A good story, he said, does not necessarily make a good case.
Shailendra Vyakarnam of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Cambridge Judge Business School said in his talk on practitioner-led education that entrepreneurs are on a journey and the curriculum needs to be tailored to that journey. Entrepreneurial education is not about writing business plans, he said.
Franklin P. Johnson, of Stanford University, led a discussion on teaching a venture capital case study. Students, he said, should "look beyond the numbers" and ask whether the person behind the proposal seems capable of seeing it through, what qualities the team bring to the project and what might be the venture capitalist's exit strategy.
Other sessions included Tom Bayers, also of Stanford, on teaching resources and new technologies in the classroom and Luis Vives of ESADE Business School on teaching business models. IESE professors Julia Prats, Heinrich Liechtenstein and Pedro Nueno also led sessions on a variety of themes.
