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First-year engineering student GraceyWilson is working on experiments at Olin College that have nothing to do with a test tube, an electrical circuit, or the structure of a model bridge. Gracey’s series of experiments are being conducted in an introductory entrepreneurship class called Products and Markets. This is a core course I teach together with JasonWoodard, Associate Professor of Design and Entrepreneurship; Caitrin Lynch, Associate Professor of Anthropology; and Joanne Pratt, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences. Products and Markets is the first of Olin’s three course entrepreneurship series. For the first six weeks of the ten-week course, Gracey and other first-year engineering students in the class sprinted through three independent experiments, each two weeks long. The students created, refined, and executed plans. They created prototypes, which took their ideas from theory to practice in the real world. Then they went back for analysis, improvement, and refinement. The idea to frame the activity as an experiment and not as a project is intentional. A project is often viewed by students as something to tackle and finish. By crafting the assignments as experiments, students are encouraged to come up with an idea and test their hypothesis. In other words, HEAR: hypothesize, experiment, analyze, repeat. Having built and honed their skills over three self-contained experiments, the students are ready for the last and most intense four-week long project, which consists of two connected experimental sprints. Gracey is part of a team that has come up with a tutoring service to provide technical help to older people who may want to keep up with friends and family on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone but lack the technical skills to do so. The team is embarking on user tests to find the greatest areas of opportunity in their market, and they have already found a client through another Olin class. The students have conducted tutoring sessions and created laminated “cheat sheet” cards for their client that show step-by-step instructions on how to text. The team is also exploring a partnership PracticingWhat We Teach: Products andMarkets is not a newcourse at Olin, but it has undergone some big changes in the past year. Howdidwe know the course needed to evolve? Simple.We listened to the market – our students. eneurialApproach LAWRENCE NEELEY ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OLIN COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING 43