Tina Seelig The Art of Teaching Entrepreneurship and Innovation No.2
But at the end of this project, I felt a little bit uncomfortable.
A little bit uncomfortable, because I felt as though that I was communicating to these students the value is measured only in terms of money, and we certainly know that that is not the case, right? Value is measured in lots of different ways. So the next quarter in my creativity class, I gave this assignment again. But instead of giving the students $5, I gave them a handful of paperclips. I was inspired by the guy - do you guys know the story of the guy who had one red paperclip and traded it for a house? How many of you know about the red paperclip guy? OK, for those who don't know about it this is a guy a couple of years ago who decided he really, really, really wanted a house and all he had was one red paperclip. So he put it on a blog. He said, "I will trade this paperclip for something anything." So he traded the paperclip for a pen, and then he traded the pen for a doorknob, and the doorknob for a Coleman stove. Anyway, he kept getting bigger and bigger things until finally at the end of the year he had a house. Now granted it was in Saskatchewan, but it still was a house. I thought I was being incredibly generous by giving my students ten paperclips and four hours. Let's see what they could do. So what do you think, what would you do if you had ten paperclips and four hours over the course of a week, what would you do? Any ideas? Any thoughts? Anyone from my creativity class? OK. Well let me show you what one of the teams did. Can I ask the folks in the back to turn down the lights, OK. OK, for those of you listening to the podcast, this was a video of students breaking in to a dorm room, or actually fraternity, and stealing tons and tons of things and walking away with $23,000. You can imagine my reaction. I was lying on the floor in the classroom, I kid you not and I said, "I used to like this job. I really, really, really liked my job," until the students said, "Just kidding. Here's what we really did." And what they did was very clever; this is one of the teams in the class. They traded the paperclips for some poster board, and on the poster board they made a sign that said, "Stanford students for sale. Buy one, get two free." And they went over to the Stanford Shopping Center and they stood there with the sign, and they kind of wanted to see what would happen. So what they did is they initially started talking to people and most folks said, "Well gee, can you carry my packages, can you take out the recycling, and all of these were low hanging fruit." Until they realized their skills were much bigger than carrying the bags and taking out the recycling. So they started telling people they were engineering students. They told them they were in a creativity class and the opportunities got bigger. One fellow asked them if they would design a radio transceiver. They said, "We could do that, but it'll probably take more than four hours." So they passed on that but a woman came up to them who was a business executive and she said, "Gosh, you're in a creativity class, can you help me out? I've got a business problem in my company and I really could use some brainstorming." So they said, "We can help." So they went over to her office, they led a brainstorming session with all of her colleagues. She was so delighted with the outcome that she paid them with three computer monitors. So they came to class starting out with ten paperclips and walked in with three computer monitors. Pretty cool? So that was great, and again the students realized that even starting with nothing they could essentially nothing they could create some value. So this project grew into something that got a lot bigger, because what happened is we got a call at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
We got a call from the Kauffman Foundation and the Kauffman Foundation said, "Hey, guess what? We have decided to run National Entrepreneurship Week, and would you guys take the lead of running something at Stanford?" We said, "No problem, that would be easy." So we called up our colleagues around campus, the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network and put together a whole host of activities over Entrepreneurship Week. There were talks, and workshops, there were panels, there was venture capitalist speed dating. All of these were well and good. But I kept having the vision of that guy jumping off the cliff and I said, "How can we have an entrepreneurship week if we don't get people the opportunity to feel what it feels like to be an entrepreneurial?" So came up with the idea of running this type of exercise with the whole campus. So told the Kauffman Foundation about this and they said, "How fabulous. Can we roll this out across the country?" We said, "Of course, but let's not stop there. Let's roll it out around the world." So during Entrepreneurship Week, we sent an email out to all of our colleagues around the world and they ran this competition with their students and the challenge was this. We gave them one pack of Post-it notes. So every team had one pack of Post-it notes. We didn't give them a time limit this time. We said, "You've got five days over the course of Entrepreneurship Week to create as much value as possible using a pack of Post-it notes. Value measured in whatever way you want. So folks, what would you do if you were given a pack of Post-it notes? Any ideas, any thoughts? What would you do? You're all too shy today. OK well, let me show you what one of the teams did and you tell me what kind of value has been created. Pretty cool? For those listening to the podcast, this was a little infomercial showing all the appliances in a dorm room and it says, "It took us 23 hours to make this video. It takes one second to unplug an appliance. This spring break, do your part, unplug it." This was put on YouTube, is watched by thousands of people, and what's the message here? What's the message? Saving energy, right? I know that when I went away that spring break I went into my office and unplugged everything. It really had an effect on me and I'm going to guess it had a big effect on everyone else. So with one pack of Post-its and 23 hours they created a lot of value. The projects that were done with Post-its were truly remarkable. There were collaborative music projects. There was actually a non-profit company was started called Gumball Capital, they came out of this, and I think it was a huge success. The next year we did it again and you can imagine students all year who had seen the showcase and seen what had happened were very excited about participating.
We packed Memorial Auditorium. It was packed to the gills. John Hennessy, the President of Stanford, got up to welcome everyone to Entrepreneurship Week, and everyone was waiting to get to see what the new challenge was going to be. And we got up there and revealed and took the lid off the box and showed them what the next challenge was and the air was sucked out of the room. Because nobody had any idea what to do with the rubber bands. They've been thinking for year about Post-it notes now the challenge was rubber bands. Our goal was to stretch their imagination. So what would you guys - that's kind of worked, right? What would you guys do if you had a handful, actually as many as you want? We gave them whatever size they wanted, whatever color, whatever shape, as many rubber bands as they wanted. What would you do? Well, let me show you what one of the teams did and you tell me what kind of value was created here. Male 1: Tired of bikes gobbing up your laces? Troublesome doorways? Loose laces caught in vicious vacuums? Constantly fighting your garbage disposal for your shoes? Being hounded at school by shoe bandits? You need Shoe Bands. With all the revolutionary technology you'll never worry about shoe laces untie it again. Shoe Bands will make you more stylish, loose ten pounds instantly, and will save baby penguins from global warming. Everybody loves them! 50 years of R&D, utilizing six sigma, lean production, and other buzzwords processes, went into the development of Shoe Bands. Made from pencil erasers, our rubber is vulcanized twice to remove bad karma. Here's what our customers have to say. Customer 1: As an athlete, I need my shoes to stay on. Velcro provides some security, but to really get the job done I use my Shoe Bands. Male 1: Recently one of our customers wrote in to tell us about the experience where her Shoe Bands saved her life. Customer 2: Should have worn Shoe Bands. Male 1: Ever since I started using Shoe Bands, I jacked up my bench press by fifty pounds. Sometimes I "double Band" it. Male 2: Hello. I'm the founder of Shoe Bands Incorporated. But not only am I the CEO, I'm also an avid and dedicated customer. Male 1: Through this exclusive TV offer, receive not two, but three packs of Shoe Bands for just five easy payments of $19.99. But wait! Call within the next 60 seconds and we'll slash a payment and send you a llama. That's right, a llama. Order today. Tina Seelig: OK good, pretty cool? Did you all need Shoe Bands? Anyway, this was really fun and this was sort of humor, they create a lot of humor with this, but there are a lots of tremendously exciting projects that were done with this. If you're interested if you go to the ECorner website and put in "tournament" in ECorner.Stanford.edu and put in "tournament" in the search box, you can get all the winning submissions for this last year and this year's project. In fact, I'm reminded as I look at one of our colleagues in the audience, is you want to actually be following this talk you can follow us on Twitter @ECorner, right? So, I know I forgot to say that in the beginning.