The Business Model Canvas (BMC) gives you the structure of a business plan without the overhead and the improvisation of a 'back of the napkin' sketch without the fuzziness.  The Canvas has nine elements: Customer Segments, Value Propositions, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Activities, Key Resources, Key Partnerships, Cost Structure.  The Canvas is popular with entrepreneurs for business model innovation.  Fundamentally, it delivers three things: focus, flexibility, and transparency. 

As a new Entrepreneurship class starts you want your students to get to know each other and get the juices flowing on how to create innovative ideas.  This lesson will give you a great ice-breaker/lesson for the first or second day of an entrepreneurship class.

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”— Tim Brown, CEO of IDEOThinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which IDEO calls design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.

This course discusses the basics every manager needs to organize successful technology-driven innovation in both entrepreneurial and established firms. We start by examining innovation-based strategies as a source of competitive advantage and then examine how to build organizations that excel at identifying, building and commercializing technological innovations. Major topics include how the innovation process works; creating an organizational environment that rewards innovation and entrepreneurship; designing appropriate innovation processes (e.g. stage-gate, portfolio management); organizing to take advantage of internal and external sources of innovation; and structuring entrepreneurial and established organizations for effective innovation. The course examines how entrepreneurs can shape their firms so that they continuously build and commercialize valuable innovations. Many of the examples also focus on how established firms can become more entrepreneurial in their approach to innovation.

The Validation Board is a tool that will help you track your progress and focus your ideas too what really matters in your new business idea.  This a part of the lean startup method for Entrepreneurs.