SCET is finalist in Excellence in Entrepreneurship Teaching and Pedagogical Innovation award at GCEC 2019
The Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET) at the University of California, Berkeley is a finalist in the category of Excellence in Entrepreneurship Teaching and Pedagogical Innovation at 2019 The Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC) conference, which will take place in Stockholm, Sweden on September 26-28.
The SCET has been nominated for its development of the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship, an approach to teaching innovation that focuses on learning by playing interactive games and understanding and developing one’s entrepreneurial mindset. The Method is used in several of SCET’s courses including Challenge Lab and the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship Bootcamp.
The Center’s director, Prof. Sidhu, developed the method along with managing director Ken Singer. As Sidhu elaborates in his new book, Innovation Engineering, when he first came to Berkeley in 2005, he noticed that often the famous successful entrepreneurs that he was bringing to guest lecture in SCET courses were often more interesting than the particular case study or business model that they would be teaching. He thought that there must be something important about their personalities and mindset that was helping them become successful.
From this was born the A. Richard Newton Series, SCET’s largest course which brings successful innovators to Berkeley with the goal of understanding their personal story and journey. The series has hosted innovators such as Marc Andreessen (Netscape and A16Z), Marissa Mayer (Google, Yahoo!), Vinod Dahm (Father of Intel Pentium), Michael Olson (Cloudera), Charles Huang (Guitar Hero), Ben Horowitz (A16z), Auren Hoffman (LiveRamp), John Battelle (Wired magazine) and John Hanke (Google Maps, Pokemon Go).
To help students understand their own ability to innovate, SCET and its Data X-Lab have developed the Berkeley Innovation Index, a survey tool that helps innovators understand how they currently rate in terms of innovative personality traits such as trust, openness, and relationship with failure. Through the SCET’s Method, students can discover ways to improve these traits and use the Berkeley Innovation Index tool to measure their progress, such as is done at the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship Bootcamp.
The GCEC annual conference is a global event on entrepreneurship education, hosted by the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship in Stockholm, Sweden. Award winners will be announced on Sept. 28.