Entrepreneurial thinking is about imagining the end and creating the means.

"That’s the mantra of Neil Tarallo, a senior lecturer at The Hotel School at Cornell University and the director of Cornell’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities. Tarallo, who learned about entrepreneurship at the knees of his father and grandfather, says that the term ‘entrepreneurship’ has become too closely tied with startups when in reality entrepreneurship is not solely about starting a business. It is a way of looking at the world."

Check out the transcript of a webinar from eCornell's webinar series, hosted by Chris Wofford. 

The global pandemic is disrupting much of the Earth's societal structures, from public gatherings, businesses, and especially education. But what will the future hold? How will higher education adapt to a changing landscape, one where the means of teaching and learning may be forever changed?

In a recent interview with Scott Galloway, formerly from Silicon Valley entrepreneur who teaches marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, we see a complex potential future for higher education. As more and more learning moves online, we may see a reduction in campus sizes, there may be an opportunity for greater enrollment. This all depends, however, if tuitions adjust to meet demand, and if a virtual network for learning can be built to match the value of on-campus learning.

"Emotion is where learning begins, or, as is often the case, where it ends. Put simply, 'It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about,'" says Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist and former middle school teacher. Her work encompasses a key element to learning, and by extension entrepreneurial learning, a deep emotional connection to the process of discovering new topics and understanding them.

"Great teachers understand that the best, most durable learning happens when content sparks interest, when it is relevant to a child’s life, and when the students form an emotional bond with either the subject at hand or the teacher in front of them. Meaningful learning happens when teachers are able to create an emotional connection to what might otherwise remain abstract concepts, ideas or skills."

Now more than ever, building emotional connections with learners must be at the forefront of educators' minds. How are you making a connection to your learners? How are you showing empathy and building those skills in your learning environment?

Posttraumatic growth is a psychological phenomenon that enables many of us to find meaning in adversity, and through that meaning we can grow. 

"Make no doubt: trauma shakes up our world and forces us to take another look at our cherished goals and dreams. [For example, take] the metaphor of the seismic earthquake: we tend to rely on a particular set of beliefs and assumptions about the benevolence and controllability of the world, and traumatic events typically shatter that worldview as we become shaken from our ordinary perceptions and are left to rebuild ourselves and our worlds."

The majority of adults in the United States report having experienced some form of traumatic experience in their lives, but what evidence suggests is that, through this new forced perspective, many are able to create meaningful growth from their experiences in a way that might not have occurred without the experience.

When teaching entrepreneurship, business, design, or management, many of us encounter three models that share some commonalities, but in truth have distinct and important differences.

While design thinking is a useful process where we strive "to understand the user’s pain, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, in order to create new strategies and solutions," it is not a roadmap to running a start-up. Rather, it acts as a way to ideate around the pains of our stakeholders to create real value. It is often confused with a Lean Startup or Agile methodologies, which both tackle different aspects of running a startup and managing its growth.

In this blog piece, we see a quick yet compelling explanation of the three models, and how we should be integrating their practices into our ways of managing and teaching to produce better, more impactful and useful products and services.