The Classroom Incubator: Fostering Student Entrepreneurs with AI

How AI Business Simulations Can Prepare Students for Startup Success

If AI gives us a speedy and efficient assistant, capable of ideation, advanced content creation and the sophisticated organisation of data, there are increasing chances for us to use this augmented business intelligence to build our own businesses from scratch, no longer needing to rely on the leverage of a large organisation to do so. 

It’s been this way for some time: since the birth of the internet, and more recently Amazon Web Service cloud hosting in 2006, entrepreneurs have found the barriers to setting up businesses have lowered. What is interesting is that, of the 33 million small businesses in the US, around eighty per cent are run by solo entrepreneurs with no employees: this demonstrates that it is possible for anyone now to set up their own solopreneurship and make a living. 

With the recent increase in the capabilities and accessibility of AI, this trend is likely to continue. This is important for young people entering the workforce for the first time. They are seeing first hand how insecure so many professions now are: and with AI taking away jobs across certain sectors (a trend likely to continue for the foreseeable future) the importance of learning entrepreneurship skills in school is more important than ever.

However, the reality is that very few schools teach the skills required to launch a new business. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2021/2022 report discovered that “Of the 13 EFCs [Entrepreneurial Framework Conditions], Entrepreneurial Education at School [EES] was rated last of all in 39 of the 50 economies participating in GEM 2021 – so EES scored lowest in more than three-quarters of those economies.” Clearly more needs to be done to ensure students leave school with a decent grounding in such a vital skill.

In many respects this is not surprising: in addition to there being little space in a crowded curriculum to teach anything extra, how many teachers know how to start a business, let alone teach it? It’s not a skill any of us are taught ourselves, and unless interest or need pushes us into it, any knowledge of entrepreneurship is likely to remain theoretical. How then can we introduce entrepreneurship education into schools, to ensure students benefit from what is likely to be an explosion of opportunities in the coming years, as AI and other digital services continually lower the barriers to entry for starting a business from scratch? 

There are many ways in which it will do so: and these are ways that teachers would traditionally have needed to explicitly teach. With AI, much of this can be done automatically, leaving students to focus on ideas and the more human aspects of business building, such as strategy, collaboration and presentation skills. 

A few of the AI accelerants for business building include:

• Generating ideas and business models quickly through generative tools like ChatGPT and Claude, meaning that students are able to iterate concepts far more quickly than before. Rather than getting stuck on initial ideas, the brainstorming capacity of AI makes idea development much faster and more efficient.

• On-demand research and market intelligence through ChatGPT plugins and web browsing through Bing, as well as operations planning to validate and refine business ideas.

• AI design tools creating mock-up images, branding, logos, and presentations, saving time when creating pitch decks. Gamma already allows for a pitch deck to be automatically generated using AI.

• Automations through tools like Zapier speeding up the sales funnel process. Zapier now offers AI integration that can create more complex automations through inputting a prompt explaining what the user wants the automation to achieve.

• Simulations designed through AI, testing hypotheses in various situations to assess the viability of ideas. 

The speed at which students are able to ideate, plan and create visual prototypes has already led to some colleges expecting more from their students: at the Wharton Business School, Ethan Mollick now has is students creating physical prototypes of the the products they have designed, as the initial development stages can be achieved so much quicker than before.

For Mollick, it is less about AI making his course easier for his students, and more about pushing them further along the business development cycle, enabling them to focus on the practical elements of execution, as the planning stages are largely taken care of through AI. 

It’s not only about business building

Teaching entrepreneurship can give students a number of important life skills. Even if they never start their own business, skills such as problem-solving, creativity, resilience, collaboration and communication are fundamental to success in the 21^st Century. The self-confidence that can come through students taking an idea through to some form of product or presentation is marked: I have worked with students who find conventional school challenging but who come alive when they are working with a team to solve a real world business problem. 

Often it is the very qualities that make for good entrepreneurs that can lead to negative behaviour in a conventional classroom: stubbornness, a desire to think outside the box, a more hands-on approach to learning, and a willingness to take risks.

I recently saw this in a collapsed curriculum week at a school I was supporting: the students were using AI to focus on solving real-world problems, and working towards a presentation where they pitched their ideas to a panel. The only poor behaviour in the entire week was when one teacher decided to show a movie loosely about AI that most of the students found boring.

When the Deputy Head suggested the students be disciplined and be made to have normal lessons the following day, I turned this on its head: if anything, I said, the teacher should be apologising to the students for wasting their time, and by suggesting they have normal lessons that was sending a signal that conventional schooling was actually a punishment. Perhaps she had a point there, albeit inadvertently.

This incident aside, what the success of the AI project showed the entire school was the power of allowing students to run with their passions, apply their learning into real-world contexts, and use AI to support the process end to end. As a result, the school will move towards a project-based learning approach to the curriculum next year and will further develop its entrepreneurship curriculum.

Bring the outside in

Augmenting digital and teacher-led learning delivery, learning direct from business leaders can add real value to an entrepreneurship programme. This can be done face to face or through online masterclasses and mentorship. There is nothing more impactful than learning from people who have walked the walk, growing a business from scratch. Parents are usually happy to come and speak to students about the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur, and developing a relationship with local businesses can provide a pipeline of experts who can be drawn on to give back to a nearby school as part of their CSR remit. 

The future of entrepreneurship education

Whilst it may be challenging for many schools to directly involve business leaders and successful entrepreneurs in their programmes, AI mentors that take on the persona of a successful business owner are not too far out of reach. Imagine a student having an AI Elon Musk, AI Mark Zuckerberg, or AI Warren Buffett to guide and challenge them through a project. We are increasingly able to prime AIs to take on these roles: at the end of the book I show you how you can use Zapier Interfaces to do just this. 

As Andrew Yang has rightly said, “In most every business, you learn by doing. The apprenticeship model is much more effective than the classroom for cultivating entrepreneurs.” However, this is challenging in a conventional school setting. Future entrepreneurship programmes will increasingly rely on immersive simulations, to mimic as far as possible the conditions of an apprenticeship model.

AI will be at the heart of these simulations, modelling real world conditions as much as possible in order to truly test student hypotheses and challenge their thinking. After all, it is pointless students coming up with ideas that seem brilliant in the classroom but fall flat on their first test with the real world. Better to learn through a low-stakes simulation than through a failed business at a later stage. 

Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and the metaverse (that we’ll be exploring in a later chapter) can also play an important role in entrepreneurship training. I was recently invited into a Dragon’s Den (the UK’s version of Shark Tank) simulation in the Engage metaverse, to judge a group of young entrepreneurs from the fully online Sophia High School, the brainchild of the innovative Melissa McBride. Each of the five finalists pitched their business idea to the ‘Dragons’: one from Canada, one from the UAE, and the rest scattered around the UK. All in the same virtual hall, pitching to us in real time. 

I was blown away, both by the quality of their pitches and the originality of their ideas. These are students who have, for a number of reasons, found conventional schooling either too challenging personally or who live in parts of the world where they cannot access a quality British education. For them to be able to assemble in a virtual hall and pitch their ideas to us was a remarkable thing. As well as Sophia High School demonstrating an academic value add far beyond any school I’ve worked with, they’re producing the next crop of entrepreneurs from their kitchens and bedrooms across the world. Remarkable stuff. 

Entrepreneurship through PBL

I’ve already written about how powerful a combination entrepreneurship and project-based learning is, through the work of THINK Global School. At the heart of both PBL and IBL is a need to solve real-world problems, and there are no problems more real world than those involving adding value - whether this is financial value into a business, or solving problems like climate change and ocean pollution.

With the support of AI, XR and the metaverse, we have the ideal conditions to create genuinely meaningful projects that teach the skills students need to be successful business owners or ‘intrapreneurs’ - those who innovate as employees within existing businesses.

Now is certainly the time to ensure every school has an entrepreneurship curriculum, as there is no longer an excuse around a lack of expertise.