Girls Middle School Entrepreneurs
Curt Carlson, Ph.D.
Professor of Practice, Northeastern University and Distinguished Executive in Residence, WPI
Using active-learning educational principles to teach essential life skills to young women
Entrepreneurial Night
Celebration: A crowd had assembled at the Computer History Museum's auditorium in Silicon Valley to see one of Silicon Valley's yearly highlights [1]. It was Entrepreneurial Night. Forty young women from the Girls Middle School (GMS) had assembled in teams of three to five to pitch their new companies to over 400 attending and a panel of venture capitalists. As the girls presented their value propositions, some of the standing-room-only crowd was moved to tears by their earnest and surprisingly impressive presentations.
A businesswoman, Kathleen Bennett, who believed young women were not getting the education they needed to flourish in our world, formed the Girls Middle School in Mountain View, California, in 1998 [2]. It's a diverse, serious school for 6th, 7th, and 8th-grade girls. The girls take math, science, computer science, and a foreign language. They also do basic shop. That surprises some people until they realize these girls are about to become young innovators and may need shop skills to make their products.
Bootcamp: At the start of the year-long program, the seventh-grade girls go through a two-day "boot camp" to learn how to form a company and write business plans. They learn about unmet end-user need identification, product design, marketing, sales, budgeting, pricing, inventory control, and the ups and downs of forming a business. They also acquire skills that most of us didn't learn in the seventh grade, such as how to use a spreadsheet and calculate return on investment.
They recruited parents and other professionals as their "board members," who also acted as mentors. They are also coached in giving presentations. Every month the girls sent their boards a performance report. They are given a budget of $200 to build their offerings. After they develop their prototypes, they hold an event where they share their products and invite GMS girls, parents, friends, and teachers to provide "customer feedback." They have to create a website for advertising, designed from the bottom up using their computer science skills.
On Entreprenal Night, they hold a trade show before and after their presentations to sell their products. After their presentations, the venture capitalists give them feedback to add to their learnings and experience.?
Each year the girls create a broad array of products and services. Some are trinkets they sell to friends, and some are services. One team wrote a book, "Middle School: How to Deal," now available on Amazon [3,4].
At the end of the year, the young girls meet to dissolve their companies. They pay back their investors, learn social responsibility by giving thirty percent of their profit to a charity of their choice, and split the rest among the team.
Customer Focus
The young women of GMS learned a great deal about what it means to create an innovation. But what is innovation? There are, unfortunately, a confusing number of definitions. For example, Merriam-Webster defines it as "The introduction of something new." That definition needs to be more specific to guide an aspiring new innovator. A more precise and useful definition is:
Innovation is the creation and delivery of new customer value in the marketplace with a viable business model that is better than any alternative and that meets the needs of all stakeholders.?
It is not an innovation if customers don't buy or use the new product or service. The "marketplace" can be in any segment of society, but people must use the offering. In addition, if there is no way to sustain its delivery into the marketplace, it will disappear and cease being an innovation. There are over 4,000 mousetrap patents, but only a few dozen realize significant sales – the others are inventions: not innovations.
Value creation is the process of developing innovations, and entrepreneurs pull together the resources and introduce them into the market. All activities start by identifying a crucial unmet customer and market need. That is, the end-user is the focus of all value-creation activities.
Innovations require learning, searching, discovery, synthesis, and knowledge creation. Value creation is the process of developing surprising, sustainable offerings with new value for customers. It is a process of understanding the market ecosystem, unmet customer needs, existing competitors and alternatives, and possible solutions. The larger the innovation, the more surprising the new knowledge created.
Active Learning
The lucky young women of the GMS have taken a big step forward in understanding how to be innovators, creating value for their customers. They have learned some of the most valuable skills, human values, and business perspectives for success in today's world.
All innovations create surprising new knowledge: the more significant the innovation, the more surprising the new knowledge. The ketchup bottle that stands on its "head" is a modest innovation. When I first saw it, I was surprised, but I immediately realized it solved a real problem, pounding on the end of the bottle to get ketchup out without splashing it all over the table. Its increasing utility in many liquid products makes it a sustainable innovation.
Some say the goal of innovative success is to fail fast. No, the goal is to create and learn fast. Success requires that we learn and develop new knowledge faster than our competition.
Ten Principles: Ten learning principles from the educational sciences facilitate the rapid and effective creation of the new knowledge required. These principles define how people best learn, improve, and create [5,6]. They are too often applied incorrectly or not at all. The power and benefits of systematically using these concepts are rarely appreciated.
These ten principles start with engagement. Fully engaged people learn, improve, persevere, and succeed. In the context of value creation, these ten core principles are:
Together these ten principles enable effective and efficient knowledge creation and innovation. As we will describe, these concepts apply in some form to virtually every learning and knowledge-creation activity. They apply to all professionals who must constantly learn, improve, and create new solutions for their customers [7].
In other posts, I have described how other fundamental concepts further define effective value-creation methodologies. They include complexity analysis, behavioral science, and organizational structures that promote exponential improvement.
1. Iterating: Repeatedly doing the task with constant ideation, reframing, synthesizing, experimenting, presenting, role-playing, reflecting, predicting, and building one idea on another.
The first fundamental principle is doing – deeply learning new ideas by applying them experientially. As Confucius said, "I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand." In this case, the learning is to be able to identify unmet customer needs and then develop unique solutions that deliver value to customers with a sustainable business model.
Learning requires intense iteration of the plan for creating the proposed innovation. We have never seen a team initially iterate aggressively enough.
After attending an innovation boot camp, the girls immediately applied the ideas they learned. They had to "do." Inevitably they found that their understanding was incomplete. Many concepts presented during boot camp seemed easy, but they discovered that applying them was not simple.
They learned that identifying customers' needs and developing products required hard thought, discussion, information gathering, and experimentation. At the same time, they had to figure out how to make their products and sell them while making a profit. By directly addressing these problems, the teams confirmed what they understood and didn't. The girls were engaged in experiential learning – obtaining skills and meaning from direct experience.
2. Feedback: Providing rapid, real-time feedback and assessment from multiple perspectives, including from all stakeholders,?while asking questions, sharing experiences, and discussing points of agreement and disagreement.
Getting feedback from others is one of the fastest ways to learn. David Kelly at IDEO tells his teams it requires "radical collaboration," emphasizing the intensity of iteration and feedback required while working with others [8]. But when captured this way, there is genius to be found in one's colleagues and partners.
As the GMS girls put their business plans together, they generated one idea after another and completed iteration after iteration of their plans. They discovered that progress was accelerated by showing their ideas to each other and their friends, families, and mentors. The girls learned that the more rapidly they iterated and received feedback from different perspectives, the more rapidly they improved.
Once the young women put their initial plans together, they faced other challenges. Did their target customers want their products, and could they make a profit? There was only one way to find out; they needed to approach potential buyers.
Making the first presentation to a customer is often sobering because few teams initially get it right. Only by asking prospective customers to buy the product while soliciting feedback is it possible to understand what is wanted. It always takes dozens of iterations with feedback from potential customers and partners to design products that fully satisfy customer and market needs. Often a completely different approach is required. Rapid, recursive feedback with customers – co-creation – is often a critical step in understanding customers' needs and the marketplace.
As the GMS girls participated in the above activities, they constantly synthesized the information they gathered to understand better the issues and solutions to address their customers' needs. That is the creative, imaginative part of value creation.
3. Teams: Forming minimal teams with the unique skills, experiences, perspectives, and human values necessary to identify and address the significant challenges of value creation.
No matter how smart you are, you are not remotely smart enough to create significant innovations yourself. Rapid progress is only possible by tapping into the "genius of teams." Innovation is collaborative; genius comes from assembling teams with essential, complementary skills. When beginning, Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates had Paul Allen, among many others. Without their starting partners, it is unlikely we would know who Gates or Jobs are today.
Team formation is a project. Forming productive teams and communicating among team members takes time and effort. For example, when developing a software application, it might seem that adding staff would proportionally increase the number of lines of code produced. But that rarely happens. Why? Because the communication costs go up exponentially with staff size. At some point, the communications cost of adding more staff reduces output. Because of these costs, the minimal possible team performs best, as described in the classic book, "The Mythical Man Month" [9].
Studies show that the optimal team size is three to five, like the teams at GMS. If the team is too small, it lacks enough critical perspectives. If it is too large, not everyone will be fully engaged.
At SRI, new teams started small. They usually consisted of a person with a business focus, a strong technical person, and a person with good operations skills. Other teammates were added as critical challenges were uncovered.
The girls on each small team of three to five brought different experiences and skills to their ventures. Scott Page calls these attributes a person's "toolbox" of capabilities in addition to one's native intelligence [10]. He means that each student brought different perspectives, heuristics, interpretations, and predictive mental models to help address the team's challenges.
Page points out that often, "progress depends as much on our collective differences as it does on our IQ scores." This observation is especially true when a problem is hard and complex. In these cases, one individual rarely has all the skills to address every part of the proposed solution rapidly. Page's research supports several conclusions:
Alan Kay cleverly captures Page's first point by observing that "Perspective is worth an extra 80 IQ points" [11]. Or better, valuable perspectives, heuristics, predictive models, and skills are worth an extra 80 IQ points. If, for example, a teammate has already solved a challenging part of a proposed solution, that knowledge rapidly moves the team forward. The best teams consist of individuals with high intellectual capabilities, enviable team values, and valuable complementary perspectives. If everyone has the same mental toolbox it often leads to conflict as they jockey for position on the team.
Teams provide other advantages. When confronted with a mental roadblock, you can feel paralyzed and demoralized. Teammates help us get "unstuck" by adding energy, emotional support, and fun when things get tough. Having a colleague say, "Please explain that to me again in a different way," is often enough to keep making progress.
Page's second point emphasizes the importance of assembling the right team. If teammates are not valued, needed, or seriously disagree about their venture's direction, they will likely produce disappointing results or fail. Success requires teammates aligned with the mission who bring unique value-adding perspectives. Restating Alan Kay, it follows that the wrong perspective may be worth minus 80 IQ points. Diversity is not the goal; it is the diversity that adds value, a fact often misunderstood.
Because of these factors, we have three core critera for forming productive teams, they: 1) share the vision, 2) have unique, complementary skills, and 3) share in the rewards of success.
4. Mentors: Including proven practitioners to provide explicit and tacit expert guidance, emotional support, and motivation for value creation teams.
The school recruited "board members" to advise the young women. These community professionals volunteered their time to help the students succeed by acting as the girl's tutors, coaches, and mentors. Having a knowledgeable tutor – someone who is a subject expert – is a powerful way to learn. For example, studies show that having a tutor can help D students become B students or better [12]. For this reason, schools often provide tutors for athletes with little time for studying when practicing a sport four hours a day.
In dictionaries, the terms "tutor" and "mentor" often overlap. However, when we use the term "mentor" in this context, it signifies an individual with expertise who has navigated the often perplexing aspects of tackling previously unsolved tasks. This refers to someone who possesses a high level of professional knowledge, extensive hands-on experience, and the ability to establish a lasting relationship with the person being mentored.
For first-time innovators, navigating the path feels forbidding, like being in an unexplored jungle on a dark, rainy night. Where do I start? What is my first goal? What happens if I get lost? Although fundamental concepts must be followed when creating innovations, no equations or exact solutions exist. Innovation requires formal knowledge plus proven insights and heuristics, which practitioners have learned over a lifetime of mistakes and successes.
Having a practitioner mentor, who has been through similar experiences many times, is a powerful way to advance rapidly. Since it is a "jungle" out there, mentors act as "jungle guides," providing guidance about what works and what doesn't. Their experience allows for feedback that is clear, direct, and comprehensible. They also offer emotional support and motivation.
Consider the example of an excellent violin teacher. There are endless mistakes a young player can make, like holding the bow incorrectly. Teachers who have learned to spot and solve problems based on a lifetime of experience help students advance more rapidly. Jascha Heifetz, the preeminent violinist of the last century, had the best teacher of his era, Leopold Auer.
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5. Knowledge: Acquiring information, partners, proven practices, huristics, frameworks for mental models, and other vital input to facilitate value creation.
Value creation requires acquiring new information, leveraging each person's and others' knowledge, and using concepts and language to facilitate collaboration. When a team begins a new project, a first step is understanding the market ecosystem, including technology trends, demographics, competition, legal issues, business models, and much more, depending on the proposed innovation. Too often, there are barriers in organizations that impede access to essential information. Value creation teams require an open network of partners inside and outside the enterprise to rapidly provide the information and resources needed.
Because value creation teams have different skills and perspectives, they must share the language and concepts required for value creation. This shared knowledge includes definitions for innovation, value creation, invention, types of customer value, and value propositions.??
One of the significant value creation issues is identifying the need to be addressed. It is where most failures start. People can readily identify problems, but determining the need to be addressed is very hard. Generally, the problem needs to be "reframed" repeatedly to discover the need to be addressed. Most people jump immediately from the problem to their solution, which is almost always incomplete or wrong.
We all have unique mental capabilities, experiences, and knowledge — our mental toolbox. Thus, we all learn, think, and create differently. Some girls might describe solutions as stories or analogies, and others as images, sketches, or mockups. The girls found their different perspectives helped them tackle their seemingly daunting new projects. They helped them better understand their customers' needs and more rapidly create possible solutions.
For some, the "aha" moment might come from a sketch, an analogy, an equation, or a simulation. Representing information using different mental models or from different perspectives improves learning, understanding, reasoning, and communication with potential colleagues, investors, partners, and customers. As a rule, the more realistic the representation, the better the feedback. Often a bad image is better than a terrific description.
Different approaches also uncover other aspects of a solution so the team can move forward faster. This concept is fundamental to mathematics. They know that complex problems require multiple representations to create solutions efficiently. Switching from one representation or mental model to another uncovers different parts of the problem, allowing it to be solved. At least two other representations of the issue are required to reason and think creatively about a problem.
In 1993 Andrew Wiles created a worldwide sensation by proving Fermat's Last Theorem [13]. At the time, it was the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics, having confounded the best mathematicians for over 300 years. His published paper included dozens of different representations and was 150 pages long.
People with dyslexia, for example, can develop learning styles to match their capabilities. One of my most accomplished colleagues gives beautiful, clear presentations. Even though the concepts described are complex, the presentations are easy to understand and compelling. They almost always include elegant, hand-drawn sketches of the different ideas presented. I asked him how he developed his remarkable ability. He said, "That is the way I think, in images. I am dyslexic, and text confuses me, so I use this approach to understand and communicate my ideas."
6. Amplifiers: Using aids and team forums for learning, including computers, the Internet, spreadsheets, simulations, and computer applications like AI-Tutors.
The students brought more than their mental toolboxes to speed up the value creation progress. They also brought knowledge of other productivity tools. These include video teleconferencing on the Internet, collaboration software, specific algorithms, CAD applications, spreadsheets, and much more. Simulations and prototypes are especially effective at quickly making progress and inspiring new insights. Steve Jobs insisted that new ideas had to be fully prototyped. A new graphical interface had to look as it would in the product. It was not enough to describe it or sketch it out.
Productivity tools are not free. In addition to their financial cost, they take time to learn. With better tools, humans must raise their capabilities too. This goes back and forth – better tools, more capable humans, better tools, and still more capable humans. Douglas Engelbart called this co-evolution. The building of better tools to create even better tools was bootstrapping. These two processes are like compound interest, producing exponential improvements in productivity.
Exponential Improvement: Technological improvement is often at rapid, exponential rates in the global innovation economy. To innovate at the speed of the market, our innovation processes must match that rate – they must be exponential. To improve exponentially, ideas must compound, with one idea building atop another [14].
Exponential improvement comes from getting feedback from others and then compounding that knowledge. Working this way can improve the value creation process by orders of magnitude. In other posts, I describe the NABC value propositions (Need, Approach, Benefits/costs, and Competition) and a framework for recurring team meetings that facilitates exponential improvement. We call them Value-Creation Forms [15].
Value Creation Forums: Forums are team meetings every 2-to-4 weeks, where 3-to-6 teams give 3-to-10 minute NABC value proposition presentations and then receive feedback from multiple perspectives. Forms provide access to information, resources, reframing, and exponential-like improvement. Value-Creation Forums were a centerpiece of the SRI-wide value-creation architecture that allowed SRI to beat IBM by seven years in the development of Siri.
7. Incentives: Incentivizing achievement, inclusion, empowerment, friendly competition, camaraderie, and fun.
We find that the most powerful incentive is achievement. Focusing on a challenging, meaningful task and addressing it is incredibly motivating and rewarding. School sports are an example. Non-profit groups worldwide are also exemplars, where people, for almost no pay, help others who are sick, infirm, and starving. The military's Special Forces are a profound version of this principle.
By every account, Steve Jobs was a demanding and mercurial person. But many superb professionals stayed with him for years because he provided the opportunity to do extraordinary work. His team knew they couldn't achieve as much and be so proud of their work somewhere else.
To further encourage success, the GMS created a family of positive incentives. At the end of the year, the girls paid back their venture capitalists with interest, gave 30% to a charity of their choice, and split the rest among the team members. Some teams earned several hundred dollars over the year, so their financial rewards were tangible.
As in any business, they added how much profit they made at year-end and compared their performance to the other teams. Only some were equally successful, which was another valuable lesson. The program is not just a feel-good activity where everyone gets a trophy for showing up. It is easy to focus on financial incentives, but experience shows that other motivations are almost always more effective.
An additional incentive is a friendly sense of competitiveness. The girls didn't want to let their teams down. They wanted to succeed to be admired by the other groups, teachers, mentors, and family. They are often motivated more by themselves than by their teacher's expectations. The teams divided their tasks so that each girl was challenged and engaged. They learned about teamwork, collaboration, giving presentations, selling, and negotiating successfully to get things done.
A final incentive is the sense of camaraderie that comes from tackling something that seems impossible at first and then succeeding. That kind of accomplishment stays with you much longer than financial rewards. The GMS young women will undoubtedly tell people about their innovative experiences for the rest of their lives.
8. Values: Modeling enviable human values – respect, collaboration, responsibility, enthusiasm, and trust.
Positive human values are critical. If teammates are not respectful, collaborative, trustworthy, and supportive, rapid feedback and intense collaboration are impossible. There are times on every major project when the team must work, day and night, for weeks to make a critical deadline. Just one horrible person on a team can bring progress to a screeching halt. The collective IQ of the group drops to zero.
Everyone has been on teams where someone was disruptive. They talk too much, criticize everyone's ideas, are cynical, come late, never agree with anyone, and don't do their part. My university friends say faculty meetings too often include someone like this, making them unproductive. To avoid these meets, participants often don't show up or meet elsewhere to move forward.
It can be great fun when a team agrees on their goals and works productively. You are with your friends doing what you want to do, and you are experiencing "flow" – time seems to disappear. And when done, the feeling that comes from working together and realizing a great accomplishment is exhilarating. That is a great team: where you are working hard, hanging out with your buddies, and achieving something meaningful.
All the GMS teams had to address team issues. Who would do what, and would it get done on time? Resolving these common issues is an essential lesson, as it is required to accomplish any meaningful project throughout life. Remarkably, no team has failed.
9. Big Ideas: Focusing relentlessly first on the few essential concepts and behaviors required for success.
There are a relatively small number of big, fundamental ideas in every field. I started in physics, where the big ideas included those from Newton and Einstein. There were dozens of other laws and endless equations, but a relatively small number were the most important. To be a physicist, you must understand them.
Value creation and innovation are like that too. There are a relatively small number of fundamental ideas but endless variations on their themes. This post concerns one of the ten active learning principles accelerating learning and knowledge creation.
A central concept the GMS young women learned is that creating a new product or service is measured only by what customers want. It was not enough to be intelligent, clever, or inventive. What the girls thought was ultimately irrelevant; what their customers thought mattered. This significant change in perspective requires focusing on the external world and being empathic about their customer's needs, not just their own. The failure to deeply understand and apply this concept is a significant reason many products fail.
10. Complete System: Assuring the application of all the active learning principles for value creation in an empowering enterprise.
Individually the concepts just described are all helpful in making the value-creation process more efficient and effective. Most teams use some combination of them. However, their real power comes from combing them into an effective overall system [16,17,18].
Throughout these posts, a central idea is that value creation requires rapid access to information in a supportive environment based on active learning principles. Information is to innovation as wind is to a sailing ship. Access to information is a primary responsibility of the enterprise and government. In extreme cases, innovative success stops if there are severe information barriers. With no wind, there is no sailing.
A significant advance is that all professionals are now online with videoconferencing. Being online effectively makes the world "transparent," so partners can be more easily added worldwide. And now with AI-Tutors learning can be further amplified [19].
A complementary requirement is that the flow of information must exist in a noise-free, predictable ecosystem. As in the sailing metaphor, success requires a calm sea. In an enterprise, the enemies of innovative success include uncertainty, politics, non-transparency, reorganizations, management changes, and on-and-off funding. These sudden changes in company or government policy create noise, confusion, and uncertainty. They impede value creation and innovation.
Coda?
At the end of the program, I visited the GMS with the program director at the time, Traci Green, a charming, outgoing woman who is a marketing executive in her professional life. She is a terrific role model and mentor for the girls. While at the school, I wanted to understand better what the girls had learned.
I asked one of the girls, "What has your experience been like?" She said, "Dr. Carlson, have you ever noticed that putting a team together is really hard?" "As a matter of fact," I said, "I have." She continued, "But have you noticed that different people generally want to do different things when you do? For example, I like to talk, so I became the Vice President of Sales. Judy is very creative and likes to build things, so she became our Vice President of Design and Manufacturing. And Sally is good at math, so she became our Chief Financial Officer."
"It was also great fun. Have you ever noticed that?"
"And by the way, Dr. Carlson, I don't know if you have noticed this, but although this was a lot of work, it was also a lot of fun. Have you ever noticed that?" I said, "Yes, I have, but unfortunately, not as early as you, in the seventh grade, working on a project like this." Alas, how many of us have?
The GMS girls worked hard, but it was gratifying and often fun. By working together, the students discovered that there was genius in the collective intelligence of their teams and great satisfaction in addressing a challenging problem and succeeding.
The ten fundamentals of active learning for knowledge creation and innovation are highly effective. We will return to them repeatedly as the benchmark for evaluating innovation best practices. Few rigorously practice these principles, and, as a result, failure rates and wasted resources in companies, government agencies, and academia are often atrocious. What is most disturbing is not the waste of financial resources; it wastes precious human resources.
As at the GMS, these concepts produce surprising and often transformative results when adequately combined. The valuable lessons these young women learned will last a lifetime. As you will discover, their experiences are remarkably like what is required by adults forming innovations and new ventures.
Note
I wrote this before COVID. I am checking with GMS to see if things have changed. If they have, I will edit this post.
?References
Go here for Linkedin:??https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/1232507
Go here for Coursera:?https://www.coursera.org/learn/valuecreation
AI Entrepreneur | Thought Leader| Clinical Psychologist, Master Therapist, Scientist, Expert Opinion, MAICD
1 年Phenomenal stuff!