Start-Up Sprint: Providing a Small Group Learning Experience in a Large Group Setting

Entrepreneurial education should reflect the real-world entrepreneurial process by providing for experiential learning. The challenge is reconciling this with the resource constraints that lead to large class settings, even in specialized postgraduate programs. This article offers practical suggestions for creating a highly interactive event as part of a largely lecture-based module. Students participate in a full-day Start-Up Sprint that uses real-world entrepreneurship tools and mimics the intense experience of a start-up event. This experiential exercise is designed to provide students in a large class with the experience and benefits of small group teaching, through a hands-on problem-based learning exercise that is supported by mentoring and live feedback. It provides entrepreneurship teachers of large classes with a way to mitigate the constraints of large classes, faculty time, and physical infrastructure and offer students a meaningful learning experience.