(Photo by Charles Gupton)

I am constantly humbled by the energy, passion, and drive that people with ideas can muster. I saw half-baked ideas turned into viable concepts in a matter of seven weeks, with the final being a 10-minute venture pitch to judges and fellow classmates.

I just finished teaching an entrepreneurship course at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. The students were a combination of MBA students and cross-campus students, faculty, and staff with ideas they wanted to check for feasibility.

What Leads to Entrepreneurial Success

What really makes the class stand out is a combination of three things:

1) Students had to pass a basic filter before getting into the class, and brought their passion and thirst for learning. They were teachable, and they made tremendous progress and effort during the class.

2) Experienced entrepreneurs served as coaches and provided focused, one-on-one guidance to each team. The level of experience in the coaching cadre keeps me coming back because I love being around these folks. One of the coaches, for example, is listed in the Inc. 500 for the third year in a row with more than 100% growth each year. With guidance from such high-caliber coaches, students are bound to improve their concepts.

3) The instructors had real-world experience that they brought out in the teaching. I taught with two others – Patrick Vernon, who’s been teaching at UNC for several years, and Kevin Bowles, who is also a new instructor and a serial entrepreneur.

As I look through the lens of experience, I realize that only a handful of the companies will make it. But they all learned critical thinking skills to assess their ideas, their markets, and the willingness of customers to pay for their solutions. These are all aspects of what each innovator must learn and apply.

When companies get bigger, say around 100+ people, the day-to-day interaction between staff and the senior leadership begins to decrease, and many ideas get squashed in the trenches or at the first level of management. It’s no longer okay to let that happen. With companies in trouble all over the world, NOW is the time to kick up the innovation. To seek out new ideas for new and expanded revenue streams.

When companies settle for small or no growth, the CEO is always to blame. It is his or her job to use the available resources to make their companies thrive. Creating an innovative culture is not easy, but it is possible. Moving from a curmudgeonly culture to an innovative culture is harder than starting from scratch to build an innovative culture. You must overcome inertia and staff that may not be prone to innovation.

Keys to Business Transformation

The keys to transformation are similar to those found in the classroom:

1) You must have people who are willing to move the ball forward. To take bold actions and challenge ideas. Even their own.

2) You need coaches who can guide innovators to morph their ideas and build commercial viability from a kernel of thought.

3) You need champions who will spearhead the innovation within your company to see that ideas get developed and presented to senior management.

Senior managers are the ones who need to see the ideas because they have the broader perspective of how business opportunities can connect to other initiatives and ideas.