Anti-School

Problem: 

Business School is not personalized & student-centric. It also doesn't require 4 years of formal education to learn SWOT Analysis, marketing, finance, etc and these degrees are often used as signals. Additionally, the current model of business education also doesn't account for entrepreneurship or social entrepreneurship education.

Solution: 

Anti-School: Alternative to a Business School - Hybrid Model between an incubator and a business school to get the best of academia and the best of startups. 

- Online classes, offline impact (easy to scale) 

- Incentivizes students to create social enterprises that target community-specific problems

- A project-based, problem-solving approach to business education.

- It creates a roadmap for entrepreneurship to simplify the process.  

If Scaled:

- Students create Social Enterprises globally that target specific problems such as the SDGs

- Quality education in many countries

- Creates jobs in multiple countries 

- Entrepreneurship can be more accessible

TLDR: Entrepreneurship is not taught & everyone thinks it is too complicated to formalize it. Also, most universities spend years on modifying their curriculums and trends in the business world change faster. 

A paper published by Amsterdam Centre for Entrepreneurship (ACE) conducted experiments on entrepreneurs to identify economic and social impacts of entrepreneurship. Their four key attributes were contribution to innovation, employment generation and dynamics, productivity and growth, and increasing individual utility levels (Praag & Versloot, 2007, Weinberger, 2016). 

ACE concluded that entrepreneurs impact employment creation, increase economic growth and productivity, and produce important, societally beneficial innovations at a very fast rate (Praag & Versloot, 2007). However, most schools do not formally teach entrepreneurship education based on interviews I conducted and researching entrepreneurship programs across schools in the US & the UK. Even fewer teach social entrepreneurship as it's often not easily profitable. 

Market Potential: 

Source: HolonIQ 

C. Mirjam van Praag and Peter H. Versloot (2007), "The Economic Benefits and Costs of Entrepreneurship: A Review of the Research", Foundations and Trends® in Entrepreneurship: Vol. 4: No. 2, pp 65-154. http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/0300000012

Weinberger, M. (2016, June 7). Why entrepreneurs are essential to the global economy - EY. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/c1d2736c-1cdc-11e6-a7bc-ee846770ec15

Social Entrepreneurship University (School) that teaches you how to be an entrepreneur by breaking down the process. While in school, students will learn what traditional business schools teach you such as SWOT Analysis, Business Model Canvas, etc. while simultaneously also learning the skills that are highly in demand in the industry and in creating a business. This includes how to create a successful team, how to really listen to your customers & how to empathize with their problems, and how to pitch to investors while creating meaningful companies. 

The entire model is project-based with peer-to-peer learning and students can choose which classes are important; this way, they co-create and co-teach teach in the school. This model decentralizes knowledge and assumes that everyone can learn from each other and this is the mindset we want our students to have both in life and in business. Simultaneously, we will connect our students with mentors and co-solve important problems in our community. Classes are online but solutions are offline in the communities that students come from. We also want to create a global investor network who will invest in the solutions that the students come up with. They have a practical education :)

Target Population: High School Graduates and Future Entrepreneurs between 18 and 25

Over the past 8 months, I've contacted about 50 students, entrepreneurs, educators and industry professionals to understand what the market demand and potential is and what the skills necessary are. As a result, I've found out that students often prefer to go to university for: 

1. The Social Experience 

2. The Safety Net that University Creates 

I found out that students, even those who take alternative paths, prefer to work and learn within a structure and therefore prefer newer models of schooling like Make School & Minerva. However, I've also noticed that students who want to start businesses are unsure of how to do so as business school doesn't teach them this. A lot of them are also certain they are interested in creating an impact but find it too difficult to figure this out by themselves. I face the same problem in business school despite doing a radically different university program in 7 countries; I have no clue how to start a business and would have also benefitted from having Anti-School around. My interviewees told me to change the name of the school though :( 

The crux of my idea targets creating a more inclusive entrepreneurship environment. I want to make sure it is accessible to those who are unable to afford it otherwise and allow for diversity in the classroom. Having online classes makes it more accessible and allows ideas to be shared globally. The students are also likely to start social enterprises in their own communities and creating jobs as a result. It could also fall into learning for girls and women but I want it to be broader than just that :) 

Competitors

- Make School: Make School has a peer-to-peer, project based model to coding education. Their model is a very useful and replicable into the social entrepreneurship education model.Their revenue model allows students to pay back their tuition once they have a job. This cannot be replicated into anti-school as entrepreneurs are unlikely to have a stable job or salary once they graduate. 

- Watson Institute: They have a social entrepreneurship course that is project-based and is an awesome alternative :) However, this is not scalable or easily accessible as it's highly expensive and on a physical campus in Colorado. This is a similar model that I want to create but an online & offline hybrid model to gain the best of business school and the startup world but make it collaborative across borders. 

- Minerva Schools at KGI: This is a new and innovative school that has an online and offline hybrid model. I study here and have had all of my classes online for the past 4 years and have studied in 7 countries as a part of my program. We collaborated with local partners on applying the curriculum but the business school wasn't responsive to the students needs. 

- Ecole 42: Also in coding and has a peer-to-peer model with only projects for 3 years. I love this and want to try to do this in social entrepreneurship. 

I have been taking online classes in my university irrespective of Covid. As a result, I've learnt the best way to leverage online platforms like Zoom & the Minerva Project Forum for teaching and learning purposes. This is the most technology that we would be working with. We might create our own infrastructure at some point. 

Already used in Minerva Schools at KGI. It's been used for all the online classes and they're releasing access to how active learning and flipped classes work over the internet. 

Refer to Solution Overview :( 

The biggest barrier for me at this point is understanding what to do next. I'd love to get mentorship with what the best, next steps are and how to get funding for a social impact school. I want help with creating a good revenue stream and how to do this effectively. If I could figure this out, I could work more on the solution itself as opposed to the logistics of trying to understand the process. 

I've been reaching out to current entrepreneurs and have been asking them about their process. I've also been comparing models across multiple schools and speaking to CEOs of schools. This has really helped me solidify my idea. 

Anti-School Model: 

• Alternative to a Business School (alternative to a University)

• Peer-to-Peer Project-Based Entrepreneurship Education - Students will take charge of their education by: 

  • Choosing which classes they take 

  • Co-Creating the classes through feedback & co-teaching

    • Students that are able to teach what they 

• Skill based-education: Based on Interviews with educators, entrepreneurs, investors & industry-professionals 

• Best of a school & a start-up incubator - Learn, Create, Apply, Pitch, Iterate - Investor fund to invest in student projects once students are confident in their ideas 

• Students start social-impact & sustainable companies that are targeted at real-world problems that you notice in the communities around you

• Each week, students focus on working on one aspect of creating a startup - We’ll have a start-up idea generator that will assign students random business ideas in teams & they will have weekly hackathons to find solutions → They will then apply all their learnings to different start-up ideas. 

  • For eg: If they have to add seeds into shampoo bottle packaging to make them more sustainable, they will try to interview prospective consumers & try to find out what they want 

    • Create an MVP 

    • Try to understand the legal structure 

    • Create a model 

    • Find methods of getting revenue 

    • Create a deck 

    • Create a plan 

    • Attempt to pitch it to investors (who are in the school investor network) as their assessment & get graded on how thoroughly they thought about everything 

I need help to figure this out and that's why I'm applying to MIT Solve :)