The best entrepreneurship classes I've ever seen looked nothing like the ones I sat through at the University of Missouri. The ones I sat through were full of frameworks, case studies, and lectures about what entrepreneurs do. The best ones were full of students actually doing entrepreneurship — talking to potential customers, building rough prototypes, defending ideas in front of skeptical peers. The difference between those two formats is enormous, and it's the difference between teaching about entrepreneurship and teaching entrepreneurship itself.
After years of running Skypig and helping teachers build entrepreneurship programs in classrooms ranging from elementary schools to MBA programs, I've come to believe the structural choices a teacher makes matter far more than the content they cover.
The Structure That Actually Works
If I were designing an entrepreneurship class from scratch, I'd build it around four recurring components.
The first is regular pitch reps. Students should be pitching something — even something silly — at least once a week. The format doesn't matter much. A 60-second pitch to the class. A small-team Shark Tank round. A quick pitch of a peer's idea instead of their own. The point is that students develop fluency with pitching the way an athlete develops fluency with their sport: through frequent, repeated, low-stakes practice. I've written about how to structure these sessions in the Shark Tank lesson plan.
The second is real customer contact. At some point in the class, students should have to talk to actual people who might use what they're building. This is the single most underrated component of entrepreneurship education. Most students have never had a structured conversation with a stranger about an idea they have. The first time they do, it changes everything. The skill of asking customers questions and actually listening to the answers is core to entrepreneurship — and it can't be developed through lectures.
The third is exposure to working founders. Bring real entrepreneurs into the room as often as possible — alumni, local founders, even parents who run small businesses. The contrast between a textbook explanation of pricing and a working founder explaining how they set their first price is enormous. Organizations like VentureWell and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship consistently identify mentor exposure as one of the strongest predictors of student outcomes in entrepreneurship programs.
The fourth is at least one ongoing project. A semester-long student venture. A real business plan for something that could plausibly exist. A continuous customer discovery effort. Something that runs across the whole class and forces students to live with the consequences of their decisions over time. One-off assignments don't simulate entrepreneurship — entrepreneurship is fundamentally about returning to the same problem week after week and making it a little better each time.
What I'd Tell Any Teacher
If I were giving advice to a new entrepreneurship teacher, I'd push them in one direction above all others: use less curriculum and run more activities. The temptation, especially for teachers new to the subject, is to lean heavily on textbooks and pre-built curricula. Those resources have their place. But they teach students about entrepreneurship without teaching them to do it. This is the principle behind learning by doing and experiential learning — the skill develops through use, not through study.
I'd also tell a new teacher to embrace messiness. The best entrepreneurship classes don't run smoothly. Students get stuck. Pitches fall flat. Ideas turn out to be bad. That messiness is the actual content of the course. A class that always runs smoothly is probably one where the students aren't taking real entrepreneurial risks. A little chaos is a good sign.
Finally, I'd tell them to use tools that compress the entrepreneurial loop. Products: The Card Game was built specifically for this — a single round of play takes students through inventing, pitching, and getting feedback in about 15 minutes. That kind of compressed practice is hard to replicate without structured tools, and the more reps students can get, the faster their skills develop. My pieces on recommended entrepreneurship class activities and how to host a pitch competition are full of more concrete formats.
The entrepreneurship classes that produce entrepreneurs aren't the ones with the most polished curriculum. They're the ones that get students doing entrepreneurial work as often as possible, in as many different forms as possible. That's the structure. Everything else is decoration.
About the Author
Aaron Heienickle is the founder of Skypig and the creator of Products: The Card Game, a hands-on entrepreneurship game played in classrooms, family game nights, and corporate offsites across the country.
He started Skypig his senior year of high school and has been building it ever since. Aaron studied Marketing and Computer Science at the University of Missouri, where he co-founded the 4impact social entrepreneurship pitch competition, and is a regular at Missouri Startup Weekend — one of the largest pitch competitions in the state.
Through Skypig, Aaron has worked with educators, students, and corporate teams to bring entrepreneurship to life through doing — not just discussing. Learn more about Aaron.