How To Create a Business in 50 Minutes
The School of Business at SUNY Geneseo has created a unique workshop, “How to Create a Business in 50 Minutes.” The workshop is designed to showcase how to incorporate generative AI into the classroom, enhancing students’ depth of exploration and experience.
You’ll find the complete lesson plan in Geneseo’s institutional repository, KnightScholar.
Key lessons that we keep in mind when using AI in the classroom are:
- Responsible and ethical use: this largely focuses on transparency and how we use AI in our results.
- Using AI as a creative partner and collaborator: instead of using it as an answering machine, we want to work with AI to help us create answers instead of asking AI for the answers.
- Importance of human oversight and judgment: Use critical thinking skills to evaluate the results of generative AI prompts. Do they make sense? Are they logical? Do they coincide with other information that we’re including?
- The importance of crowdsourcing the truth: ensuring that your results are valid by doing additional work to verify them.
Students participate in various exercises in our Entrepreneurial Ideation class to develop different business ideas. We emphasize the importance of infusing purpose into these concepts. In our purpose module, we conduct an Ikigai exercise known as the “Reason for Being.” If you are unfamiliar with the term, it originates from Japanese culture. It is particularly well-known in Okinawa, Japan, which is considered a Blue Zone—a region where people experience exceptional longevity. In this exercise, the first two questions of Ikigai are personal: What do you love? And what are you good at? Students typically do well in answering these questions. The next two questions require a bit more exploration, and this is where AI can enhance the experience for students.
The third question to consider is: What does the world need? For instance, we can explore the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, encompassing broad and complex issues. We can utilize AI to break down these complicated topics into manageable problems, allowing us to develop entrepreneurial solutions. Additionally, students may want to focus on local issues. To do this, they can examine government websites, publications, or resources from the Chamber of Commerce to identify existing problems and opportunities. They can also collaborate with charities and nonprofit organizations. Incorporating AI into this part of the exercise enables students to personalize their learning experience, allowing them to concentrate on meaningful topics.
To use AI effectively, we teach users how to create prompts using the RACEF model: Role, Action, Context, Example, and Format. Assigning a specific role to the AI improves its performance, and the same applies to the other elements of the model. By incorporating these details into the prompt, we can achieve more relevant results.
Our fourth question is: What can you get paid for? To identify this, we ask students to investigate resources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Indeed.com, and other sources of vocational data. Students must grasp that the effective use of AI hinges on their ability to apply critical thinking and judgment skills when reviewing results. One of Copilot’s best features is that it provides several links to the content it creates. This allows you to easily highlight and see Copilot’s sources, and then you can investigate the results further. We ask students to link to the cited sources and explore them directly, then look at multiple sources to crowdsource the truth.
The “How to Create a Business in 50 Minutes” workshop demonstrates the integration of generative AI in entrepreneurial education. The program emphasizes four core principles: ethical AI usage, AI as a collaborative tool, critical human oversight, and verification through crowdsourcing. Using the Japanese concept of Ikigai (“Reason for Being”), students explore personalized passions and skills while leveraging AI to investigate market needs and opportunities. The RACEF model (Role, Action, Context, Example, Format) guides students in creating effective AI prompts. Throughout the workshop, students learn to combine AI tools with traditional resources like government databases and labor statistics, while developing critical thinking skills to validate and verify AI-generated information. Educators are encouraged to consider implementing these frameworks and principles in their own classrooms, as they provide a structured approach to leveraging AI’s potential while maintaining academic integrity and fostering critical thinking skills (this last summary paragraph was written by Claude.ai).