There’s an exercise that I used to do with students in my entrepreneurship course: I would give each team of students an envelope with $5 inside. I’d tell them that this money was their “seed funding”— money they could use as start‑up capital to create any type of profit-generating venture that they wanted. At the end of one week, they would present their venture to the rest of the class and reveal how much they had earned in profit.
Constraints Don’t Have to Be Constraining
What would you do if you only had $5 in startup funding?
January 28, 2020
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Summary.
Entrepreneurs look at constraints, such as limited funding, as a disadvantage. In fact, entrepreneurs who use these constraints to think more creatively about their value proposition tend to have better track records as innovators. To illustrate this, a business school professor describes how she gives student teams o$5 in seed capital and one week to create a business model around it. She describes how the most profitable of these ventures often don’t use the $5 at all.
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Make your next business case more compelling.