Microsoft: Global Entrepreneurial Education

What if you could teach someone to be an entrepreneur? Or more specifically to think like an entrepreneur?

Every country is interested in helping its citizens start companies and build jobs. The ability to teach entrepreneurship skills to anyone interested in starting a company or supporting an ecosystem can radically accelerate a nation’s ability to advance. There is an insatiable demand for innovation and entrepreneurship to help individuals and companies thrive in a competitive and dynamic marketplace. However, there hasn't been a well-charted course from rough ideas to polished ventures.

Our team created course content in partnership with Lean Start Up Machine , that actually trains students in how to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and tested it out through a series of pilots in different parts of the world; like Malta, Canada, China, Korea, and Nepal. These pilots were a great success. Details of some of the pilot MIC experiences are in the video, which gives an inspiring glimpse of the impact of this entrepreneurship training on students in Canada and Malta.

Based on those initial findings and in an attempt to bridge the gap, the MIC Program built some content to scale-out worldwide to the MIC Community.

This is based on Tina Seelig’s book, Insight Out: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and Into the World. The goal of the workshop is to help attendees create and foster the entrepreneurial mindset.  In this interactive workshop, participants learn a new model pioneered by Stanford Professor Tina Seelig. This framework captures the attitudes and actions that are necessary to foster innovation and to bring breakthrough ideas to the world, to compete in a dynamic marketplace, and bring to life disruptive ideas.

The Invention Cycle workshop is comprised of individual modules in which participants are led through a series of projects that provide stepping-stones for identifying their ideas and putting those ideas into motion. This 1-day workshop is designed to foster innovation and to empower participants to apply their innovation and inspire others to believe in their ideas.

We offered this workshop to the MIC community in 12 languages: