From the classroom to the marketplace: What are business students learning in the real-world?

It wouldn’t be a Centre College class without real-world application.

Entrepreneurs and business owners know what it’s like to see dreams go up in smoke. For students in David Anderson’s course, “Business Principles: Entrepreneurship and Beyond,” an experiential learning opportunity allows its students to adapt on the fly with less risk than your usual startup.

Anderson, the Blazer Professor of Economics and Business, is teaching a brand-new elective on business principles, a course that emphasizes entrepreneurship, creativity, resource management, ethics and more. Students have been tasked with setting up a booth at Vendors’ Village, a local retail stall store.

“This is a unique experience that I've never had before in my academic career,” said Francisco Lacson, a computer science and business major. “Instead of working with simulations — with fake money and fake customers — we are running with real products, an actual store, real customers, and real costs and risks involved.”

It’s what Anderson calls a “new adventure” for business students, where they’re taking in-classroom learning and applying it in real-time at the booth. They don’t have a huge amount of items — in size or quantity — but they’re taking risks and adapting based on what the market is telling them, Lacson said.

“These real business decisions helped us learn what products to sell, how to market it to consumers, while trying to break even while dealing with expenses and rent,” he said. “This was a special opportunity to try our hand at entrepreneurship in a supportive, lower-risk environment. It's bringing together everything we've learned in class to life."

Anderson teaches the students that about half of all businesses fail within the first five years, revealing what he calls the “inherent challenges of being an entrepreneur.”

“With the Vendors’ Village experience, young entrepreneurs discover the challenges early on and can learn from their mistakes,” Anderson said. “The lessons from small-scale retailing like this are quite transferrable to other situations. Every entrepreneur should carefully study the needs in their market, understand the target audience, explore product options thoroughly, price appropriately, display products prominently, market aggressively, and be nimble enough to pivot to alternatives when necessary. It is always tempting to cut corners on the formula for success.

“My hope is to allow young entrepreneurs to make mistakes in a safe environment so that they can achieve excellence when it matters most. The business majors at Centre College are a remarkable group of students with ambitions to go far. I do my best to arm them with a toolbox of business skills. They are a delight to teach, and I always learn a great deal from them as well.”