Using Business Plans For Teaching Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Many educators use the preparation of a Business Plan as a culminating assignment in entrepreneurship courses. Additionally, a number of institutions and organizations conduct business plan competitions to further entrepreneurship education. The objective for both of these exercises is to prepare student entrepreneurs for the challenging task of authoring a coherent and compelling document to communicate their proposed new venture to a variety of audiences including potential investors, lenders, employees, and partners. Some research shows that business plans are not always the key success factor for the success of new ventures, but the exercise of writing a business plan is an important planning tool for entrepreneurs and a valuable integrative educational process for students, because it requires the student to employ concepts from a variety of their courses including marketing, finance, accounting, strategy, operations, and human resources. This paper provides a case study of a recommended method for teaching students how to prepare business plans using the best known methods from the literature, and from the requirements of organizations that finance new ventures. The case study also provides suggested tools for writing the business plan, and a rubric for evaluating the plan.