MBA 047: Educating the Entrepreneur with WILL CARDWELL

Elevator Pitch: Who is Will Cardwell?
Will Cardwell is originally from the United States, but has lived in Helsinki, Finland, since 1996. After marrying a Finnish woman they moved to Finland where he completed his MBA. He returned to his home country to complete his PHD at the University of North Carolina. Shortly after that he returned to Finland to teach and research. Will wrote a book that compared Finland and Israel’s venture capital and tech finance systems.

Starting Out
Will started his career in the investment banking industry. He realised he liked the seed and pre-seed stage more, so he left that company. He ran Valimo Wireless, a software company for a few years as well as a chain of incubators. In 2010 three universities merged together to form a new university in Finland, called Aalto University. Will was hired to set up die entrepreneurship centre there. He left Aalto in 2013 to form a venture capital firm and advisory under the brand Courage Ventures. They invest in very early stage startups, mainly in Finland. Will also does innovation and entrepreneurship training around the world, including South Africa. He’s recently been invited by his alma mater, the University of North Carolina, to be Adjunct Professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. Will also founded an education technology accelerator in Finland called xEdu.

Disrupting Education
Although physical assets are still important in certain cases such as laboratories and libraries, Will feels that the classroom is where most of the disruption is taking place. The nature of lecturing – one lecturer to many students – lends itself to the online class format. The physical assets are important for building communities, so Will suggests that universities are built to maximise the interaction between people.

From Segregation to Integration
At Aalto University the focus is multidisciplinary in an attempt to jump-start the innovation activity. Aalto Design Factory was a multi-disciplinary experiment by the Department of Engineering in 2008 where they converted an old factory into a makerspace. They hosted vocational skills classes there parallel with rigorous academic content. The result was a cross-pollination between the business, engineering and creative faculties syllabi. In 2011 they joined forces with Stanford and started an online class in writing a business canvas model. The emphasis was very much on customer development. At the same time Nokia, the national champion company of Finland, was struggling and could not employ as many people as in the past. Students had to find other places of employment.

More Dynamic Educational Content
The Business Model Canvas and Customer Development should be your focus. They are different ways of looking at business processes. Most importantly they enable you to track your progress. Will is involved in many programmes around the world where they use an online tool to monitor the progress of teams. The teams set up their canvasses, as well as their hypotheses and then document customer interviews for feedback. They try and simulate the activities in as fast a way as possible that is necessary to understand how a business should emerge. The online tool serves as a way to evaluate the business model.

The Business Model Canvas
Will suggests a lean launchpad course on Udacity. A person can learn the basics about business processes and the vocabulary in about 6-8 hours. After that an entrepreneur can think about approaching potential customers to discuss their needs. By doing this you get an understanding of the problem. From there you can figure out your solution, where are you going to add value.

Customer Segmentation
Build customer journeys – potential investors love looking at a detailed storyboard. To have a deep understanding of your customers is a m...