10 Business Ideas

Empower students to brainstorm new business ideas for products or services related to their areas of interest. According to various surveys, up to 75 percent of Gen Z’ers claim they ultimately want to become entrepreneurs. As digital natives who grew up influenced by the internet and social media, they’ve seen success stories of young entrepreneurs and they value flexibility and autonomy. Two-thirds of this generation are also committed to social change and claim a desire to find—or create—jobs that will positively impact the world.

When students are able to visualize how they’ll apply the content they’re learning, they’re more engaged. By empowering them to combine their creativity and personal interests with course content, they’ll invest more fully in the material and connect what they’re learning to potential business opportunities.

Activity Steps

• Begin by discussing problems, challenges, and opportunities that exist within the discipline.
• Ask students to note their own skills, interest and experience related to those challenges but also generally through education and employment.
• From those discussions, ask students to select an aspect of the discipline based conversation that interests them, combine it in Generative AI with a list of their own skills and interests, and prompt it to brainstorm ideas for products or services that fulfill a need while maximizing the student’s attributes.
• Bring students back together as a class or in small groups to discuss their business ideas.

Considerations

• This in class activity could be further developed into an evaluation where students add to the ideas they started with, determine target audiences, and even create business plans.
• For non-business programs this may be as much depth as you need to go into, for Business and Entrepreneurial programs this may be a good introductory activity to act as a base for an in depth look into business development practice.