During the last week of September (25th to 29th), Passerelles numériques Vietnam was very happy to welcome five volunteers from different branches of JPMorgan for an entrepreneurship workshop. The aim of that workshop was for the students to design their own business plans including market analysis, customer insight and finance forecast.
Four of the volunteers (Da Chen, Ling Zhang, Rahul Razdan and Sung Bae Park) took in charge a group of approximately ten students during five days. The fifth volunteer, Karan, who came from the Learning and development department of JPMorgan, joined on the fourth day. During these five days the students of PNV19 didn’t have any IT classes or any other classes. They were purely focused on their entrepreneurship goal.
The mornings of that week were occupied by theory teaching led by the volunteers to explain strategies of entrepreneurship and marketing. The afternoons were devoted to teamwork.
Workshops always guided by a volunteer from JPMorgan.
Each student group had to come up with an innovative idea of business plan. The four proposals were a Volleyball coffee shop where one could play volleyball and then have a coffee and a rest at the bar, a breakfast delivery service, a pet coffee shop where one could have drinks and play with cute little kittens and puppies, and a fair trade idea that would connect directly farmers to their customers.
Once the ideas were settled, the students had to validate the relevance of the plan by conducting a market research. To do so, each group created a questionnaire and went out, to supermarkets, to the beach, on the street, to meet people and conduct interviews. This is a very sociological approach to a problem and it took the students on the field, which rarely happens to IT students, logically. The students really enjoyed conducting the interviews themselves and meeting people to discuss the ideas they were passionate about.
Once the idea was validated (for they were, the four of them), the students had to create a business model canvas applied to their idea answering the nine typical questions regarding value proposition, customer segments, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key resources, key partners, key activities and costs. This part, as it does for every business plan, took them quite a while to achieve. But they did it, with efforts and the help of our great volunteers!
The four groups then created prototype websites to be in the starting blocks to launch their ideas on the market. The website creation linked the entrepreneurship learning to the IT learning the students do at PNV.
A raging competition went on, led by our three meticulous judges.
On the last day, three judges from KPMG, GreenSolution and ConnectiveTech joined the team to referee. The elected project was Fresher Healthier Faster, the fair trade farmer project. We congratulate them, as well as the three other groups.
Part of the FHF.com project description. Well done guys!
The education team also noted that since this workshop, students’ attitudes have beneficially evolved. They used to give up more easily when facing a difficulty but thanks to this entrepreneurship workshop the volunteers helped them to expand their mindsets. Now they want to overcome their difficulties and find solutions to their problems. Because the volunteers quite impressed them, they maybe became role models in a way. Now PNV19 students want to learn and able to speak many languages, to make money and to travel around the world!