Discovering entrepreneurship by going through a design thinking process and developing a business plan was the goal for the students at Kantonsschule Hottingen in the the one-week camp of BizSmart Global. BizSmart Global is an education organization founded in the Silicon Valley, USA which provides high tech entrepreneurship camps to teenagers. BizSmart Global contacted us to collaborate and co-lead this camp together by providing two of our coaches.

During this week, the students were confronted with three real world business cases from the Silicon Valley, covering topics of self-driving cars, drones for new learning experiences and hand exoskeletons. The students worked in teams of seven while taking on roles like CEO, CTO, Voice of customer, etc. fitting their personal strengths and interests.

In a first phase they started to understand their business cases and defined the problem. Moving on, they brainstormed and came up with first solutions for their business cases. Later, they developed a marketing strategy, defined a sales strategy and discussed the ethically relevant topic of data monetization with their products. By doing so, over the week a rough business plan for their product was created and ended with the final pitches. The teenager groups came up with interesting pitches of innovative products and exciting strategies.

For us as teampact coaches it was great to work with these young high school students and support them by exploring their potential as well as introducing them to the Design Thinking approach. On the one hand, it was exciting to see how rather young people already work well with the Design Thinking process and deliver worthwhile results. On the other hand, the students encountered similar problems in teamwork or understanding the problem as people in the working world are confronted with. Similarly, it was stimulating for us to work with experienced coaches from the US and learn and exchange how they handle coaching situations or workshop design.

We are looking forward to another collaboration with BizSmart and we are happy that we had the opportunity to give the high school students from Hottingen an inspiring experience and a glance at entrepreneurship!