Journal of Business Cases and Applications Creative-thinking exercises, Page 1 Creative-thinking exercises for entrepreneurship class

While opportunity recognition is a key component of entrepreneurship and may sound straight-forward, it is not necessarily easy to do. Students may grasp the concept of opportunity recognition but not know how to begin to accomplish it. To facilitate this understanding, this paper develops classroom exercises that offer practice in noticing the many ways that a variety of topics and contexts are related to entrepreneurship. Each exercise will not initially appear to be directly related to entrepreneurship. The basic topics for the exercises are games, nature, works of art, and geography. After the students complete a brief exercise, the instructor explains a variety of ways the exercise ties to opportunities for selling products and services. The exercises are short enough that they can be used as a brief introduction, but there is sufficient complexity in the entrepreneurial concepts tied to each exercise that they could launch a discussion for a full class period. The exercises could each be used as an icebreaker for an entrepreneurship class, either at the beginning of the term or to introduce chapters or concepts during the term. Students gain insight into how looking at a topic from a variety of angles can yield multiple possibilities and ideas with business potential. The exercises are designed to demonstrate how alertness to the external environment allows an entrepreneur to identify business ideas in a variety of contexts and unique approaches to solving problems