High School Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship in Secondary Ed? Are we talking about a lemonade stand or a lawnmower service? These would have been two ideas that I would have thought of when I was in high school in the mid 80's, but times are certainly changing. The millennials are changing the nature of business ownership and creating operations as anonymous CEO's behind the cover of their computer monitors. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Chen and Shawn Fanning may not be household names to you and me but they have created a market shift with their creations of Facebook, You Tube, and Napster- all while they were in their early 20's.

The lemonade stand has gone high tech and collaborative exchanging of ideas through blogging and social networking has created ways to exchange ideas and to collaborate in ways that were once done face to face.

Having a student understand and create a practical business plan in the area of their particular interest has great potential. After speaking with many key educators and business professionals that have background in this area, it is clear that while the business plan and process are important, it is the creative thinking and idea creation/sharing that is essential to a good start. Not only that, but many have advised me to put less focus whether or not an idea comes to fruition, and instead, focus on giving students the skills and tools to explore and FAIL as part of their experiences. (I was advised that real entrepreneurs don't necessarily spend months crafting a plan- they actually DO the plan and learn along the way)

Ideally we like to think that there is an entrepreneurial spirit in all of us. Most adults, however, have made decisions in life to not explore self-employment (while that number is steadily increasing) for a variety of reasons. I recently read a study that indicated that more entrepreneurs come from families where they were exposed to parent(s) who operated or ran their own business. This gives credit to the notion that entrepreneurs are made, not necessarily born. There certainly is a drive and passion in those that have succeeded, and I believe that if we infuse this spirit and skill set into our teenagers' curricula, we will have provided them the opportunity to experiment, fail, grow, learn, prosper, own, organize, critically think, manage, be engaged, be prepared.

The new lemonade stand just began to look a little sweeter. Stay tuned.....