A Link Between Learning, Outcome and Entrepreneurship

Middle-school student Cassandra Lin admires “the unexpected hero.” She loves the YouTube story about a young boy from Malawi who created windmills out of bicycle parts to generate electricity for his village. “I think that was great,” Cassandra says. “Even though he never finished school, he built windmills. He learned on his own. Nobody expected a Malawian kid to generate electricity.”

And nobody expected a kid from Westerly, RI, to create an award-winning recycling program called T.G.I.F. that generates fuel for the needy in her community. But that’s exactly what this sparkly, no-nonsense seventh grader has done. To Cassandra, it’s all no big deal. It’s what she does with her friends after school.

The Way We See It

As we found in our recent entrepreneurship study, to be an entrepreneur is to navigate a never-ending series of questions where the learning curve is steep and long. In fact, nearly the entire entrepreneur experience can be understood by looking deeply at what and how entrepreneurs learn. What’s most striking is that despite the availability of formal entrepreneurship education programs —especially at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels—the majority of learning occurs informally. It comes from talking with peers and mentors, studying precedents and following existing models, listening to stories, and practicing. 

The genesis of the T.G.I.F. project is a case study in creative pragmatism, as Cassandra explains it: “We looked at an array of problems to see what we could solve in our own community.” A few important strands came together: she learned about turning cooking oil into biodiesel when she attended the Rhode Island Green Expo in 2008; she knew her local community had a non-sustainable program to provide emergency heating for the needy; and, she heard that local restaurants and residents were pouring fats, oils and grease (FOG) down their drains and clogging up town sewage pipes.

Cassandra and her team puzzled over how to combine these problems to devise a solution. An article she found on Google about SF Greasecycle, a municipal effort in San Francisco to collect and recycle cooking oil, clinched the deal. “All of our problems kind of snowballed together,” she says. That snowballing is no accident. The different pieces that coalesced to form T.G.I.F. were gathered in by a rare combination of forces: clear-sightedness, logic, and a splash of ingenuity.

Broadly speaking, entrepreneurs need to continually assess and build knowledge across three different areas: core knowledge, business knowledge, and experiential knowledge. Cassandra achieved all three through the creation and development of T.G.I.F. Today, it is a sustainable enterprise that has collected more than 36,000 gallons of waste cooking oil a year. By converting the grease into heating fuel, or biodiesel, the project is bringing an estimated value of US$60,000 of alternative energy to needy families in the local community.

As the nation continues to explore learning outcomes and credit options for experienced-based learning, we must look at stories such as Cassandra's as role models for student engagement. And, we must create new secondary educational models that recognize and support the types of knowledge building achieved through entrepreneurial thought and action.