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ENTR490 Final Reflection Essay
When I decided to take this course as on of my practicum courses for the Entrepreneurship minor, I had a lot of expectations going in. Growing up in the heart of a city, I had grown accustomed to seeing businesses rise and fall as just a fact of life. It was commonplace to see a new restaurant or business pop up for a few months and then promptly close. Seeing this so often happening I kept wondering what the businesses that stuck around were doing right where so many others had failed. What I really wanted to get out of the course was a understanding of what made urban entrepreneurship special and how to start an urban venture the right way. I wanted to find out what special considerations I would have to make, and what kind of understanding I would need before I could hope to start a successful venture in an urban community. Looking back at the course, I can say that while some of my questions were answered, I still feel a little let down when it came to our project work. Overall though I enjoyed my time with the course and feel I have gained new understanding of what it takes to be an urban entrepreneur.
I found the best parts of the course to be the instances where I got the chance to interact with actual Detroit entrepreneurs, through hearing them present and talking with them afterwards. I learned a lot from them on how important it is to understand not only the pain your customers face, but how important it is to understand the way your customers see the world, and to contextualize your venture in a way your customers connect with and see value in. I also found hearing stories during lecture about entrepreneurial failures and the lessons learned helped me start piecing together what pitfalls to look out for when looking to start a business in an urban environment.
Even so, I can’t help but say I was disappointed in the project portion of the class. While I understand each group’s entrepreneur has different schedules and availabilities, I felt my group’s entrepreneur did not regard our efforts to devise and validate a business model with any seriousness. I was excited at the start of the semester to hear we would be working with an actual startup, but my experience fell much more along the lines of a research project than any real form of consulting. I can’t help but feel let down by the lack of care shown by our entrepreneur, and feel I missed out on a great opportunity to apply what I have learned in previous classes to a real startup right in Detroit. This by far was the biggest disappointment of the class.
On the whole, I felt that this course was a good choice as one of my practicum courses. It helped answer several of the questions I had in regards to urban businesses, and gave me a new perspective on how businesses need to adapt to an urban environment to be successful. While I wish my group’s entrepreneur would have taken our efforts more seriously, I appreciate the opportunity to examine a real business and validate how it would or wouldn’t work. Moving forward, while I don’t plan to start a business immediately after college, I now feel I have a more complete grasp of what knowledge I need to have before I start a venture, and have a good sense what it takes to be a successful urban entrepreneur.
12/10/
When I enrolled in Urban Entrepreneurship I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I am pursuing the entrepreneurship minor and have been looking for ways to get more involved in Detroit since I’ve gotten to campus, so I thought the class had potential to be a good fit. However, I didn’t know what it meant to be an urban entrepreneur, a knowledge gap that was quickly filled. Throughout the semester we were fortunate to meet a wide range of urban entrepreneurs. The companies they represented had incredibly diverse products and goals, however they had a common theme of positively impacting the city of Detroit. Something that I learned early on in the course was that a company doesn’t have to be a nonprofit to improve it’s community; by providing either a positive product to consumers or hiring locally a company can act as an urban entrepreneurship project and significantly improve a community. Getting to hear about the variety of ways that companies were going about this was a great and unexpected benefit of the class. One misconception that I had coming into the class was about the impulsivity of an entrepreneur. Although I’ve taken classes before where I was required to produce a business model canvas and other documents, this was the first class that really emphasized how much of a process a successful entrepreneur goes through. The fantasized “aha” moment is in reality the culmination of many calculated decisions based on research and repeated iterations. Though this realization may have taken away some of the drama associated with being an entrepreneur it also made success as an entrepreneur feel far more attainable. A situation where this course has already helped me is through having experience with customer discovery interviews. I was recently applying for a summer internship with a company exploring a potential entry into a market and they were looking for individuals with market research experience. Being able to reference real, hand-on experiences I’ve had with customer discovery was definitely a positive and a helpful talking point in the interview. Additionally being put into contact with Ray was very helpful. I’ve had some interest in education technology but have had trouble meeting people with experience. Outside of work with Shift_Up, Ray gave me a few very useful tips and insights into the industry that I wouldn’t have otherwise received. I’m not sure at the moment when if ever I hope to become an entrepreneur. I hope at some point to be able to pursue a venture that I am passionate about, but even if that never happens I believe many of the principles of entrepreneurship will be translatable to any career I pursue. One thing in particular that I think will be helpful is building my stage presence. Though I’ve given presentations before, the perfect pitch assignment was unlike anything I’ve done in college and required me to come out of my shell a bit. In future presentations I am going to try to keep that in mind to help myself stay relaxed while speaking. This is just one of a few soft skills that I think will be useful no matter what path I choose in the future, and I look forward to discovering more in the future as they continue to help me.
Thanks for a great semester!
old. This led to a pivot from our original plan, but better fit the needs of the business. As I move
forward into my future as an entrepreneur and into my career, I believe that the lessons we have
learned in this course will follow me. Not just in business, but nearly all facets of life, we need to
sell our ideas whether it be a product, a service, or skillset and with the experience I have
obtained in this class, I believe I will be more successful in doing so. The only thing that
somewhat disappointed me about my experience was minor issues amongst my team.
Communication problems within my group most definitely made the experience less enjoyable
then it could have been, however, because of the short duration of the class I did not feel like it
was necessary to waste time to try to resolve these issues.
Reflection
I have thoroughly enjoyed the Urban Entrepreneurship course, but not in the way I thought I would. At first, I thought it would be one of my easier courses, since it only met once a week. Boy, was I was wrong! My team and I would be in contact very often and we struggled to master the business model canvas and even struggled individually on the quiz. This course was definitely more about real life entrepreneurship than any other course I have taken. I was realistically graded on the merit of my course work outside of the classroom compared to other start-ups. Although, it may have affected my overall grade, I learned to be more serious about starting a business. Being an entrepreneur is no cake walk, you must get to know the market and a good idea is not always enough. Timing is essential to the success of any venture. I was lucky enough to consult with Shift Up which I truly believe has potential. Although we didn’t have much contact with Ray, I appreciated his willingness to help and share his experiences. I was proud of how far along our presentation got by the end of the course. We gelled better as a team the more we met and although there were hiccups along the way we made peace and kept it moving forward. I was excited about winning 2 of the three competitions (with 1 still undecided). The popcorn challenge video was my favorite. At first I was nervous about working in a class that is mostly group oriented, but I found out communicating is one of my strengths. I especially enjoyed learning how to pitch to customers and how to form a story to grab their attention. The in class activities were refreshing and they helped all the students get to know each other better. Little by little the class started to feel like a bunch of friends. As I begin to eye graduation next year, I will definitely consider working at a startup. Although the pay may be lower and the risk higher, the potential for growth is tremendous. If you you go through the process of discovering your customers and verifying your problem/solution you will have higher chances of succeeding. Although, I was surprised by the amount of work that goes into getting a start up off the ground I would even consider starting my own! This class has prepared me well for my future ventures and the instructor was very knowledgeable in entrepreneurship. My suggestions to make the course better would be to organize the canvas assignments tab better. I see the value in having material from past years, but it did get confusing when submitting new assignments. I would also suggest that the course be offered twice a week instead of one session. Other than that, I enjoyed being apart of the class and felt that grading was mostly fair. Whenever I had a question it was answered and I am grateful for the opportunity to consult a real start up for class.
Final Reflection Essay ENTR
For the past 3 months, I have been given the privilege of being in Professor David Tarver’s Urban Entrepreneurship class. I have learned many new entrepreneurial tips and secrets of succeeding in the market by being fully immersed into the market while consulting for Darren Riley and CoShop. I personally found this experience to be very useful and rewarding. This is the first class I have ever taken where I got to deal with a real-life entrepreneur, and I definitely appreciated the experience. It was very rewarding being able to help a startup business in the matter of a few months and actually feel like I was contributing to the success of CoShop.
The most important things that I learned from this class are all of the different steps in the design process from concept ideation all of the way to validation of the idea, as well as the creation of a business model canvas (BMC). Laying out all of the steps was very helpful to me and is a valuable skillset that I had never though of previously, that I will use one day to create a business of my own. The main aspect of this course that I found the most important and interesting was the creation of a BMC. By creating a BMC, a business is able to lay out the entire design of their business in a single document. I think that it will be very beneficial to me when trying to start a business because it will help me organize my thoughts initially and make starting a business a little bit easier.
I think the most disappointing aspect about this course is that we do not get to see what our work actually does for the entrepreneur and the business. I think it would be really cool if we could see how our work was put into use and actually seen how the work my team did influenced the business. I think that CoShop could get up and running very quickly, so it is disappointing to me that I will never really get to see how my team’s work helped CoShop as a company.
The most surprising aspect of entrepreneurship that I gained from this class that it takes a lot of time. Our entire team has worked on this project throughout the semester and it seems like we have just scratched the surface of the things needed to starting a business. It is crazy to me that starting a business is so time consuming and takes so many resources. I was not surprised to see that with direction and help, entrepreneurship can be very fun and enjoyable. I have heard before that if you want to start a business, it is a very good idea to have a mentor that has been there before and has the experience to help you along the way. Professor Tarver has really helped our team throughout the semester and I think it has helped us progress our new idea of CoShop to what it is today.
I will always keep the information that I have learned in this class with me as I grow and develop into my future career. The lessons that I have learned about team working, consulting, customer discover and entrepreneurship in general will help me establish a career and hopefully a new business one day. This class specifically has showed me that there is a market out there for everybody; I just have to go find the right one for me. Any doubts that I previously had have been put to rest. Urban Entrepreneurship has given me necessary tools and motivation to pursue an entrepreneurial venture in the near future. Overall, I am very glad I took this class and will recommend it to my friends.
ENTR 490 Urban Entrepreneurship Final Reflection Essay
What are the most important things you learned from this Urban Entrepreneurship course experience?
Coming into the course, I had no idea what Urban Entrepreneurship was or how it worked. I just know that someday I want to live completely comfortable off my entrepreneurship skills to have more time to enjoy life, this including traveling, helping the youth, working out, teaching others my skill set that pays the bills without a 9 to 5, etc. The most important things I learned from the class that will help me achieve such goals are figuring out what the customer really wants, creating a business model that is clear and simple to understand, knowing how your skill or business that pays you will make money, and lastly that entrepreneurship is a longevity task consisting of grinding, time, patience, love, and life-changing experience that if done right has the potential to make you financially free and happy for a lifetime.
What did you find most rewarding about the experience?
The most rewarding experience for me was seeing another African American male older and wiser than me who also attended Michigan and graduated to become a successful entrepreneur who sold his company for over 20 million dollars. This showed me that its possible for me to do the same. Will our paths be the same probably not? But seeing another man that looked like me do it, motivates me even more to tackle the challenge of being a successful entrepreneur.
What did you find disappointing about the experience?
A disappointing experience for me in the course was only going to Detroit once. The University of Michigan has more than enough money to send students to Detroit at least twice for this class. There is no better way for students in an urban entrepreneurship class to get the experience of what entrepreneurship is other than by working with real entrepreneurs in person.
What aspects of entrepreneurship did you find surprising as a result of your course experience?
Aspects I found surprising is that it can be quite challenging to develop a business model canvas the correct way. A lot of entrepreneurs fail at what they are trying to develop, and lastly, the developing a solution to a problem isn’t what you think it should be. But what people who will essentially use the product who knows what the solution is. Develop products to the demand of who you are trying to sell them to.
Which of your impressions about entrepreneurship were confirmed by your course experience?
An impression confirmed about entrepreneurship was the effort, time, and love that goes into what you are doing is your life. You are basically doing what you love for a living. Going to Detroit for the urban entrepreneurship trip gave me the real-life confirmation of these things after seeing people run their business in action.
How will what you learned in this course inform your future actions regarding entrepreneurship?
From this class, there will entrepreneurship of some sort in my future. My plan is to have a career until I can quit my 9 to 5 and live completely from skills or business as an entrepreneur.
How will your Urban Entrepreneurship course experience influence your career in general?
ENT
Prof. Tarver
Urban Entrepreneurship: A Final Reflection
Coming into Urban Entrepreneurship, I did not know what to expect. The idea of owning
and managing my own entrepreneurial venture, the same force that motivated me to study
entrepreneurship as minor, drove me towards this course, but the word “urban” was the real
compelling draw. I had never thought to look at entrepreneurship from the vantage point of an
urban-focused business despite living in the shadow of a major urban community in Detroit. It is
now safe to say that I will never look at the concept of entrepreneurship the same again. These
past few months have opened my eyes to both the potential and the hardships of running an
entrepreneurial venture. Framing the class in a way that uses Detroit as a microcosm for the
larger urban enterprise community was easily one of the most beneficial and rewarding aspects
of this course. Detroit is my home, it’s a community that I care deeply about. Having a course
that spends so much time diving into depths of what makes Detroit the city it is was one of the
most rewarding experiences I’ve had during my educational career.
When looking at entrepreneurship broadly, or even more narrowly in terms of the
urban-focused aspect: one of the most powerful things I learned in this course is that the process
is so important. In twelve different class sessions, this was always our focus. Keeping the end
goal in the periphery but really honing in on the process. It’s important to have an idea, but
without going through the ideation process it will never truly develop. Thinking your customers
may have a need is great, but you can never truly know what they need without customer
discovery. Going through this process can seem meticulous at times, I even found myself
questioning why this “busy work” would even matter, but when you get to the final result it is so
clear why the process is so important. Entrepreneurship is about serving a need and filling a hole.
You can’t fill a hole if your process is flawed.
The most rewarding aspect of this class was definitely the ability to work with a real
outfit in Detroit on their entrepreneurial venture. Often times, studying entrepreneurship seems
intangible. I know for certain I have haven’t formulated my “million dollar idea” yet. Getting the
opportunity to work with a real, growing venture in the city was a truly once in a lifetime
experience. To make it even more rewarding, I found myself just as invested in SuperNatural as I
would have been in any venture I created on my own. Getting to speak with Lauren Hood,
putting myself in her shoes, and driving real business solutions intensified my passion and made
me excited to work with my group each and every week. It was also very stimulating to get to
learn from other groups in the class and see them develop. Hearing about customer discovery by
the Add Savvy team or the revenue model of Space Labs, these things helped me develop my
own entrepreneurial toolkit through my peer's struggles and successes.
Throughout my time in the entrepreneurship program, I’ve found it difficult to really
“learn” entrepreneurship. It just seemed so intangible and difficult to grasp how all of these skills
could really be put into practice. Urban Entrepreneurship flipped that line of thinking completely
on its head. Not only could I see the direct applicability between the concepts that Professor
Tarver and the team of guest speakers spoke on, and the work we were doing, I could see these
skills coming to fruition in other aspects of my life as well. The critical thinking and value
drivers that go into taking an idea and maximizing its potential are so well developed in this
course. Urban Entrepreneurship exemplifies exactly how the practice should be taught to the next
generation of entrepreneurs, and I know we will all see the large-scale effects of these teachings
very soon.
truly feel like this class has been the most realistic example and best practice to create my own start up.
Entrepreneurship 490 Urban Entrepreneurship Dr. Tarver
Class Reflection
Over the course of the semester, I learned a lot about entrepreneurship and the city of Detroit. I believe this class taught me how to focus on a community and look for needs and potential areas of profits.
Unfortunately, I was not able to go on the Detroit experience trip, but I did end up going to some of the company’s on my own. I really liked going to Good Cakes and Bakes and being in that part of Detroit. Growing up, my father worked in Detroit, so very often we would go downtown, but I have never been to other parts of the city. This class made me explore the city and I never realized how large Detroit actually is.
I really enjoyed working with the same group of people throughout the entire class. I believe it is beneficial to stay consistent with groups in order to create the best business solution throughout the class. I made some great friends because of working with my team. Being able to work with an existing company was invaluable. I believe by working with a real company, I learned existing struggles. Many of my entrepreneurship classes have students create businesses, but I believe working with an existing small business was a much better experience.
One thing that was disappointing was how difficult it was to talk with my groups entrepreneur. I worked with Incite-Focus and Blair was very difficult to communicate with. This made our project very difficult and lead my group to do a lot of research about fabrication labs, manufacturing and different markets. My group was very invested in the project, but our entrepreneur was not invested in us.
The personal charisma video was very beneficial to learning about myself. It really made me reflect on who I am and how I lead others. The video helped my understand that Charisma can be learned and it is something I can always work on. I tend to be less receptive towards others when I am stressed and this video helped me learn how to work on that part of my personality.
One mini project I really enjoyed was the Popcorn challenge. This was a great way to start the class. I enjoyed the aspect of creating a small company quickly. It allowed us to go from the investing stage (getting money from you), to production, to sales, and profit payouts. The whole nature of this project was very rewarding. One disappointment with the project was the fact the video was not graded. I spent a long time making the video professional while other
ENTR 490
Final Reflection
Prior to this Urban Entrepreneurship course, I had absolutely zero background in
business, much less how to start a company. Throughout the course, I learned some incredibly
important things including the basics of starting a business and why you must have a passion and
purpose for the venture you want to grow. More specifically, I learned that in order to own and
operate a successful business, you MUST know the customers you are targeting and what
problems they are actually facing. Additionally, it can be extremely helpful to outline your
business idea in a business model canvas, or something of the like, just to better organize your
thoughts and develop a basic structure for your business. Most importantly, I discovered that in
order to help fix a problem, you have to go out and talk to the people that are facing this
problem. You cannot devise a solution by looking from the outside and instead must try to
experience the problem firsthand.
Aside from learning about entrepreneurship, I learned a lot about collaborating with your
peers and how important team dynamic is to your business’ success. Additionally, I learned a lot
about how to effectively work with and lead a team, and what to do when team members don’t
agree or don’t have the same vision for the venture. On the other hand, I experienced how
rewarding and exciting it is when your team overcomes a challenge and has a breakthrough in
something you have been working extremely hard to achieve. In addition to learning about the
team, I learned a lot about myself and how I play a role in a team. I learned about my personality
and my strengths and weaknesses, and strive to always be improving going forward. Lastly, I
think I gained a lot of confidence and really ventured out of my comfort zone with public
speaking.
The most rewarding part of this course was being able to go to Detroit and actually see
firsthand what these people are experiencing. I had never been to most of the parts of Detroit that
we saw on the tour, and it was interesting to get out of the Ann Arbor bubble. Seeing the
entrepreneurs we collaborated with working so hard to do good for the city was inspiring and
gave me hope for the future of Detroit.
This course confirmed my belief that starting a business is extremely hard, and you will
go through infinite changes in your plan before you get to the ideal solution. I believe the process
is equally as important and rewarding as the result, and that you learn more from your failures
than your successes.
Coming into this course, I didn’t think that I would ever start a business. I am still
hesitant, but I definitely want to incorporate some kind of business into my career, whether that
be entrepreneurial or not. I believe that entrepreneurship is an excellent skill to have in any
career, especially health and medicine which is the field that I want to enter. I believe that the
skills I have learned and the information I have gained in this course will complement my career
in medicine well.
Professor W. David Tarver
ENTR 490
10 December 2018
Final Reflection Essay
I was interested in this class because I believe it is important to think about how the
decisions we make affect the communities we are in. I am in the club Enactus here which is
centered around social entrepreneurship, so I had an idea of what socially minded
entrepreneurship was like, but I wanted to go into more depth. When I hopefully start my
own business one day, it is essential for me for it to have a social good component of it,
which was further confirmed by taking this class. Thankfully, Entrepreneurship 490 did not
disappoint in teaching me some of the lessons I need to know going forward in my life, not
just in starting my own business, but also in business practices in more standard lines of
work.
Some of the most important lessons came in the way of teamwork. My team had a
wide variety of personality types so we had to learn how to use each other's strengths and
weaknesses to overcome any challenges we ran into. Blair, our entrepreneur, was not as
responsive as we would have hoped, which taught us a valuable lesson. We understood he
was very busy, so we had to adapt and pivot how we saw fit, and that gave us more
independence and autonomy, similar to pushing us into the deep end and seeing if we
could swim. We floundered for awhile, but we ended up with a great final project. In
starting a new business, it is vital to be flexible, and this project and its twists and turns
taught us that.
This project also solidified the importance of customer discovery and spending a lot
of time perfecting the business model. We found ourselves frustrated as a team, because we
did not have a direction to go in, and we were not 100% sure what problem we were
solving. We needed to really examine what the needs of the community were and find how
Incite Focus could benefit them. No other entrepreneurship class I have taken so far had
stressed the importance of these tasks as much as this class. It really showed me the value
in them, since we spent the vast majority of the semester iterating over the business model
and going out into the community to gauge interest in Incite Focus. It is impossible to know
how to solve a problem in a community if you do not know about the culture and needs of
the people in it.
One of the most unique and interesting parts of the course was going into Detroit to
learn from the entrepreneurs there. Despite being so close to the city, I had not spent much
time in Detroit, and when I did, it was mostly in the downtown area. Going on the tour
debunked some of the stigmas we have about Detroit and showed how there are
businesses that are growing and making a difference in the community. This aspect of the
course was one of my favorites, and should definitely be kept in the curriculum in the years
to come. Working with locals who are have already started their businesses is also a good
idea in my opinion, because many of the students in the class are not from Detroit and are
not fully aware of the challenges of the city. I think it would be difficult to do enough
customer discovery and immersion in the community to really address a problem in
Detroit, within the first month of class, so I think the procedure we followed this semester
was a good one.
