The Startup Scratch Book : Opening the Black Box of Startup Education

Abstract

Teaching entrepreneurship and startups is a challenging task. Approaches using real or simulated entrepreneurship as a teaching method are also common in startup education. However, as educators and researchers, we typically only observe the outcomes of the startup journey between weekly lectures and other meetings, whereas the actions taken by the student teams can seldom be observed. This makes the process a black box. All valuable learnings, realizations, and big ideas happen in the students’ minds, and little evidence exists to say what happened during the course. As a result, we are entirely missing out on the most critical elements of the learning process. To remedy this issue, we propose a new tool for startup education: The Startup Scratch Book. Based on extant literature and our experiences in the area, we have devised this novel approach to learning diaries in startup education. We discuss the specifics of this proposed approach in this paper.