Support is key to success for business creation courses

I. What is a PCE course?

In a PCE course, students form teams around an entrepreneurial project. It's often a business creation, but it can also be an association or cooperative. For this simulated project, students must prepare everything for launching their new activity. Supported by different facilitators, they build a complete business plan for their venture over a semester or a year. The programme generally concludes with a defence of their project before a professional jury (intended to represent a group of potential investors).

II. PCE courses offer several advantages:

1. They bring learning from different subjects into coherence

Communication, marketing, finance, strategy, field research, value chain setup, logistics, human resources, legal aspects… Nothing must be left out of the business plan! These different subjects, studied separately in traditional courses, find their full meaning in the synergy of an entrepreneurial project.

2. Learning by doing

Students apply everything they learn during their studies to the concrete case of their business project. "Learning by doing," "flipped pedagogy," "learning through practice": the terms abound to describe this mode of learning, which has proven motivating for students and effective for embedding knowledge by allowing direct practice of new expertise.

3. Learning in teams

For PCE courses, students are generally in groups of 4 to 8 people. People often talk about a "pizza team": a team you can feed with one or two pizzas. Complementarities quickly emerge within groups; students divide the work according to their strengths and weaknesses, but also according to the skills they want to develop. The first thing they learn in PCE courses: organising as a team, and defining each person's responsibilities and roles.

4. Adopting a professional posture

In a PCE course, students are actors in their project and take charge of it in a quasi-autonomous way. They don't have a "teacher" for this course, but are supported by different coaches and experts. Depending on the format, student support is provided by one lead person or a succession of different facilitators. In all cases, students steer the ship, and teaching staff become a resource, support, reinforcement. For the final jury, the expected quality is that of the professional world. Often, these juries are made up half of external people from the business world.

5. Sparking entrepreneurial vocations

PCE courses are a powerful adventure for students, giving them a taste of the entrepreneurial journey. The projects are simulated, certainly, but it's not uncommon for some students to decide to continue their PCE "in real life"!

III. Supporting PCE courses: a puzzle!

PCE courses can be an unforgettable, formative experience for students, but for that to be a success, the quality of support provided is absolutely key!
Supporting students well requires several things:

• a competent, engaged, motivated support team, but also coordinated. The different facilitators must be aware of each project's progress, status, dynamic, and issues.
• efficient organisation: depending on the number of students and projects involved, this organisation can be more or less complex. At EM Lyon, more than 1,700 students complete a PCE every year!
• a structured programme where facilitators and students clearly know what is expected
• listening to students! In a PCE, students steer the ship, certainly, but many groups need help at crucial moments in the project! The key to a PCE programme is setting up communication channels so facilitators can quickly identify students' difficulties and respond!

But how do you coordinate the intervention of different experts who almost never meet?
How do you ensure their interventions are relevant and illuminating when they must help students who all have different projects and issues?
How do you know which students need particular attention when there are 50, 100, 500, 1,000?

IV. Follow Lab: so your PCE courses succeed!

The heart of Follow Lab is the pedagogical link

This includes the pedagogical link between students and facilitators:

• on one side, facilitators have easy access to students' work in progress and appointment summaries. When they start an appointment, they know at a glance who the students are, what their project is, their latest deliverables, their issues and difficulties.

• on the other, students have a clear view of expected deliverables and deadlines, and receive facilitators' feedback and advice after each appointment. They can exchange on work in progress and alert about their difficulties.

• facilitators have access to their personal notes, but also to comments written by facilitators who came before them. Gradually, they no longer act as isolated, independent facilitators, but as a true teaching team: coherent, coordinated, and supportive

Follow Lab also facilitates organisation and supervision

When there are many students, setting up an alert system could quickly become chaotic without information prioritisation and an overall view. On Follow Lab, pedagogical leads have dashboards to follow a large number of students in real time and quickly identify necessary actions.