AVL can help your students develop leadership skills through the entrepreneurial approach of solving real problems. High School students experience peer-reviewed, Ivy League rigor in an intensive online cohort. We customize our program to fit your school schedule.

The Entrepreneurial Approach - Lab for High Schools

The Process: We start with a “Hackathon” where students come up with an idea for a solution/product/service to test. They can work in teams or individually.

We then take them through a series of entrepreneurial-thinking and audience discovery exercises that is hypothesis driven and designed to identify a specific “need”.

As students begin to coalesce around a value proposition (originating from their audience discovery), we transition the workshops to business thinking and argument building exercises.

Students use their analysis to create a pitch document articulating the problem they are solving, why it matters, their solution, why their target audience will adopt/buy and whether there is an organization/business there.

Finally, students present to a panel of alumni (or our contacts/network) based on the types of problems being solved in the cohort.

Added Benefits: The exercise is purely intellectual, but individuals or teams that want to continue to develop their ideas are invited to join our ongoing weekly Clubhouse activities that include conversations with organization leaders, industry experts, and/or entrepreneurs and venture capitalists as well as access to additional resources to help them build their problem-solving and entrepreneurial skills. The Clubouse is open to students from all cohorts so it is a great place for students from different schools to meet each other, share experiences, and potentially work together towards greater impact.

If interested, students can post their ideas and pitch documents on our website on a cohort-specific page. Students can include the URL in their resume, LinkedIn and other outward-facing mechanisms that highlight their work. Our network of subject-matter leaders, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are invited to look through the ideas/solutions which is a great way for students to get noticed in fields in which they are interested.

All students will be invited to join future competitions focused on developing solutions for specific problem statements.

Timing Options: We are currently delivering our programs remotely in afternoons and/or on weekends, but we can meet a school’s specific scheduling needs.

We can run our Lab as:

• An 8 week program (once a week for 90 minutes - 45 minute workshop and 45 minutes of group discussion and Q&A)

• A 4 week program (twice a week)

• A 2 week program (three times a week)

• A 1 week intensive (five times a week)

Please contact us to inquire about adapting our Entrepreneurial Approach above or any of our other workshops (at this link) to your needs.

The Origins of Our High School Program

This month, we are launching a series of virtual programs that teach entrepreneurial thinking to high school aged students. These workshops are based on my experience in two key areas. The first is my 10+ years advising early-stage companies whose IP originated from academic research. The second is the human-centered design and customer discovery techniques I deliver to Dartmouth students and faculty in my role as administrator of the National Science Foundation I-Corps program. I also coach Tuck students and undergraduates as a faculty adviser in the following programs: the Tuck Incubator, the Entrepreneurial First Year Project (Tuck's culminating experience class) and the Diversity Entrepreneurship Collaboration. 

Last March I piloted to high school students a modified version of what I’ve developed as part of a spring break March “intensive”. Our program was an all day, week long, vigorous stretch where students identified a need, tested their hypothesis with a target audience, developed a solution and determined whether the solution could be turned into a viable business or could have a social impact. We trusted that participating students would step up to the plate and we pushed them to take ownership over their success. The students loved the experience and found particularly valuable the confidence they gained in articulating their vision and the autonomy they received over the direction of their solutions. The teachers liked the fact that the students were invested in critical-thinking and argument building exercises from a unique vantage point involving self advocacy.

The experience of working with students who were unbridled in their creative thinking, but were receptive to creating structure around the execution of their own ideas was a real pleasure. At the end of the workshop we wanted to engage more students in that age group so we formalized the program and added a Clubhouse component where teams that wanted to continue to explore and develop had a home and access to additional resources. Once COVID hit we moved everything into the virtual environment which has given our program more reach and more depth because we can call on resources from across the US and the globe to contribute to the entrepreneurial conversation.

We are now offering a customized program that meets the needs and objectives of individual schools. We can modify the program length and/or when the program is delivered during the week. If a school has a particular focus for problem-solving, we can tweak the workshops to facilitate specific groups of solutions. Examples of categories of current interest include: needs around social impact and community, climate and sustainability, health and wellness or technology development. Finally, we have experience attracting, organizing and facilitating alumni participation which creates another touch point between the current work of students and the greater alumni network.