Professor Wins Award for Helping Students Rethink Old Objects
An experiential exercise from Bradley’s Entrepreneurial Creativity class wins award and shows that students learn entrepreneurship better by creating, building and testing prototypes.
01/25/2017 11:15 AM
Dr. Eden S. Blair, an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Bradley University recently earned second place in the 3E-Learning Competition at the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) annual conference in Philadelphia, PA. This competition recognizes the best experiential exercises that help students learn entrepreneurial theories and concepts. The top ten submissions were accepted into the finals.
Titled “You Had Just One Job (or Two… or Three)”, Blair’s exercise incorporated theories of new product development and design thinking. Students redesigned an everyday object, such as a chair or pen, into a new product that met the core jobs of the original. After building a prototype, the student teams produced their own video commercial and distributed it to customers via social media, where they receive feedback. This activity has been successful performed in Blair’s Entrepreneurial Career class for many years.
Blair received a cash prize and her exercise will appear in the Experiential Entrepreneurship Exercises Journal (http://launchideas.org/) in the Spring.