Few days ago, my friend Luigi Capello invited me to give a few lectures about business model canvas at the LUISS University and I am immensely happy for that opportunity. I adopted a very practical approach, with the objective to let the students experience some very common pitfalls in the startup process:
- Do not fall in love with ideas, because they have little value. Rather, one must focus on solving customers’ problems.
- Try to explain your product in one sentence, because in many occasions you will not have the opportunity to go further.
- Talk immediately with your potential customers, try to understand where they are and what they do.
- Try to define in what market and in what industry you are going to compete.
To make things a bit ‘more lively I gamified lessons introducing a points system and quests. The content of the four lessons is shown in the following slides:
In all lessons, students were required to actively participate and contribute to the discussion and to present the results of the quests. The mechanism works quite well: excluding someone, clearly less interested in the subject, the class has responded quite well, producing good quality results.
I am convinced that gamify learning is crucial: I find it quite strange that game is used to teach children, and is essentially abandoned to teach adults. We need to find clever ways to use game mechanics, transforming professors in game masters.