Finalist

Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year Award

Blaise Crettol

Finalist of the Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year Award

HES-SO Valais/Wallis - Switzerland

"Business eXperience, nobody’s perfect but a team can be!"


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Summary

The 4 main points that make this program unique are the following ones:
‐ this entrepreneurial program is proposed to the last‐year bachelor students from the management schools and the engineering schools of the University of Applied Sciences in Western Switzerland, which represents not less than 5 degree programs, from Systems Engineering to Business Administration, going through Business IT, Tourism and Life Technologies.
‐ The teams are constituted with the objective to have as diversified members as possible, in terms of backgrounds, competences, genders and strengths to be brought into them. For this last point, the Belbin process is led, which helps to identify the strengths that anyone can bring within a team, and this is used to create teams who have strengths in all skills.
‐ As the program is firstly based on experimentation, each team must run during the year a “project pilot”, which leads it to go on the market, including the management of the supply chain, the finances, the project management, the HR and soft skills, and of course to meet its customers and realize a sale act during a life‐size iteration.
‐ To get more flexibility in managing seed money for the teams, an association with the same name was created, in which all the alumni become members. They are involved in the program in several ways, such as being one‐time sparring partners for the new school ventures, or becoming mentors and/or co‐financers for them. by operating in this way, the network becomes particularly efficient.

Key People


Prof. Antoine Perruchoud
Head of HES‐SO Team Academy
HEG,  HES‐SO Valais/Wallis


Images

IMPACT STORY

Impacting lifes

In the summer of 2006, the IDIAP international institute for research in biometric recognition (www.idiap.ch/en) contacts our program to propose a collaboration in the framework of one of their research projects in facial recognition. In this context, they also wish that one of their researchers could actively participate in our training program during the coming academic year.

During the traditional two‐day initial BeX Camp, a team of three B&A and one computer science students and the IDIAP scientist is formed. During the academic year, they push the project as far as possible, and in the summer of 2007, a start‐up is launched, composed of the scientist and the student in business and administration who was the leader of the project. KeyLemon was born!

In 2008, the company is incorporated, and in 2009, it has over 1 million downloads of its application. In early 2010, the company is nominated as one of the top 100 start‐ups in the world at the Red Herring Global 09 conference. The company now has a dozen employees.

In the following years, the company goes through different phases, and its founders discover all the emotions of an entrepreneur's life, from the best to the most learning ones.

Finally, in early 2018, KeyLemon realises a magnificent exit, being acquired by the Austrian group AMS, the main manufacturer of 3D sensors for Apple, for an unspecified amount.

LEARNINGS

Lessons learned

‐ During the early years, we allowed our students to create the teams based on project interests and individual affinities. If this was regularly successful for the first teams, it was unfortunately no longer the case for the remaining students, who were faced with a double problem: they could not always find a common project that motivated them, nor partners with whom the cohesion was always good. After several experiments, it appeared that the optimal way to constitute the groups, in terms of motivation and balance within and between teams, was to use the method mentioned in the first chapter of this document, including the identification of the strengths of each person according to the Belbin method.
‐ In the same spirit, we always favoured a great deal of freedom for our students and for the different teams, based on the idea that every mistake was also an important learning experience for each of them. After many iterations, however, it became evident that it was useful to force certain dynamics in the teams. In particular, since we introduced a mandatory "pilot project" for each team, we have observed a significant qualitative leap in terms of experience in the field.
‐ Finally, we regularly observed that it was absolutely useless to make prognoses on which projects would be successful or not. Indeed, after these years of observation, it appears very clearly that the human factor is much more important than the theme for the potential success of a start‐up.

FUTURE PLANS

What's coming?

Among the many thoughts underway for the Business eXperience program, here are the most
advanced of them:
‐ One of the main goals going forward is to continue to incorporate new degree programs, as stated in the first Triple E Awards submission form. We are currently in discussion with 3 new programs, which are Visual Arts, Social Work and Nursing Science.
‐ In the near future, the school would also like to offer longer‐term support to these schoolsventures after the end of their bachelor's degree. In this context, it is setting up an incubation program, including business and technical coaching as well as seed financing.
‐ Last but not least, the next batch of Business eXperience students will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the program. To mark the occasion, we will organize a big event, to which all the of the program will be invited, as well as many renowned entrepreneurs. In addition, all the co‐workers and students will also be invited to this big party, in order to stimulate the entrepreneurial spirit within our school. The location is still to be defined, but it could be under a circus tent, and mixed with the performance of the circus.


KEY STATISTICS

124

Number of school‐ventures that have gone through the program since 2003

>20

Number of companies incorporated

547

Number of students who passed through the program

5

Number of degree programs involved

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