Princeton University feature story on Introduction to Entrepreneurship, Keller Center's newest entrepreneurship class, by John Sullivan, Office of Engineering Communications (originally posted on December 15, 2014)
John Danner moved across the auditorium at Princeton University, tossing questions at students about a possible business startup. Like an insistent collaborator, he probed for unknown hazards. What else, he prompted, what next? What was the thing they were not thinking of? What was lurking to trip them up?
"It has to scale," said junior Rachel Leizman.
"Does it have to scale?" Danner asked, raising his hand to punctuate his question. "What about a small flower shop, what about a bodega?"
"Well, that's a scale," Leizman shot back, drawing a laugh from her classmates.
Danner, a veteran entrepreneur with a booming voice and an easy presence, used fast-paced dialogue and friendly banter throughout a recent session of "Introduction to Entrepreneurship" — a class taught for the first time this semester — to jolt his students into thinking in new ways about what it takes to start a venture. Proposals became epic stories; business plans were charts to guide an enterprise through hidden shoals waiting to sink an unwary new company.
"We want the students to develop their thinking and sophistication about how entrepreneurship plays out," Danner, an entrepreneurship specialist at the Keller Center, said after class. "We want them to see this as an option, whether their motivation is to launch a new technology or a new industry or to change the world."
Continue to the full story on the Princeton news homepage.