Acting as a Business Angel to Become a Better Entrepreneur: A Learning Innovation

Abstract

TV shows such as “Dragons’ Den” and “Shark Tank” have become common teaching materials in entrepreneurial finance classrooms because they offer a window into the process of pitching to investors. TV exposure to pitch communication and business angels’ feedback is certainly a well-documented source of vicarious learning. It enables students to observe varying investment situations and learn from other entrepreneurs’ success as well as failure. Observation, however, does not replace direct experience. We combined vicarious learning and direct experience in order to enable students to learn how to take initial investment decisions, in practice. We originally proposed this training session in an entrepreneurship graduate program in France. This learning activity invites participants to become observers and actors in a real-life experience with entrepreneurs and angel investors. Students participate in a pitch session within a Business Angels Network (BAN). The BAN chooses entrepreneurs based on their applications and an evaluation meeting for the first round of a live pitch in their usual deal flow. Students are first spectators to the real-life pitch session, in which entrepreneurs face a team of five to 10 business angels (BAs). Then, students play the role of an active participant, making their own investment decisions in a report on each entrepreneurial project, as if they were BAs themselves.