Entrepreneurship Quest – Session Summary

How do you teach entrepreneurship to children, in a world where entrepreneurship is so important?

In Acton, this question is answered with an entrepreneurship quest. The entrepreneurship quest is one of the only two quests that are regularly done each year. For six weeks, the Eagles plan their own products from scratch and eventually participate in the Eagles’ business fair and sell their products.

The quest itself includes the following steps:

1. Brainstorming – At this stage, the Eagles bring up some ideas for products and develop each idea a little so that the ideas can be compared to each other.

2. Market Survey – At this stage, the Eagles choose one or two products and examine the consumers’ responses to it by conducting a market survey. The Eagles prepare the surveys by themselves and give them to as many people as possible to fill, in order to get feedback about their product.

3. Formulating the Product’s Identity – At this stage, the Eagles better formulate their product’s identity: What characterizes it? What would its logo be? What distinguishes it from the competitors?

4. Financial Analysis – At this stage, the Eagles analyze their product in depth from financial aspects: How much does it cost to produce one unit of the product? What are the fixed costs and what are the variable costs? How can they save on different costs? What is the final price of their product and what profit will they see from it?

5. Competitor Analysis – At this stage, the Eagles learn about the importance of competition in the free market and try to understand against who their product competes and what this competition means.

Each stage is accompanied by in-depth work pages and the product that the Eagles make gets gradually built during each stage. In the end, the summarizing exhibition is a mini-business fair where each Eagle places a stall with his/her product and sells it to visitors at the exhibition. In our studio, the Eagles chose a wide range of products: Cookies, drinks, jewelry and even sushi-candy.

What I like most about this quest is the fact that the Eagles do it all by themselves. I have seen many children’s fairs, both here and in Israel, and in many cases, I saw that the main part of the work was done by the parents: Both in the financial aspect of purchasing the product parts, and in the design aspect of the product itself. Here, the Eagles did everything by themselves and learned a lot from their successes and as usual, especially from their failures (for example, brownies, where each piece is priced at $3 is not a recipe for great success…).

In his successful book, “Entrepreneurs Are Made, Not Born,” Professor Lloyd Shefsky writes: “You can be an entrepreneur, no matter what your I.Q. is, what your physical ability is when you were born and what gender you are. Make no mistake – Entrepreneurs are very special people, but before they became entrepreneurs, they were ordinary people… You can learn everything you need to be an entrepreneur”. In my opinion, entrepreneurship is a very important skill in the new world, and in the quest, the Eagles do in Acton, they slowly develop their entrepreneurial muscle.