Wild Code School launched a joint project with INSEAD, « the business school for the world », to take its students one step further into their business venture. The project was launched in November 2016, during INSEAD kick-off of the entrepreneurship elective. This project is a first step toward collaboration between INSEAD and Wild Code School, both schools having the same mission of bringing about pedagogical and technological innovation.
If you were to enter one of INSEAD’s amphis and ask participants “How many of you want to start or purchase a company”, over half of the students would raise their hands. This comes as no surprise since INSEAD was founded by entrepreneurs and continues to be one of the most entrepreneurial among all elite B-schools. INSEAD now offers 19 entrepreneurship electives and eight out of ten students take at least one of them. 60% of Wild Code School students – or “Wilders”, as they are called – join a start-up after their training. “We have a project-based approach: instead of cramming theory into our students’ brain and then sometimes having them apply it to a class project, we do the exact opposite. They learn by doing capstone projects with real clients”, Anna Stépanoff, Wild Code School CEO, says.
Professor Bill Magill, Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD, leads one of the courses on entrepreneurship, called Technology Venturing Practicum. The course is designed for students interested in developing the model for a technology innovation from raw concept to market introduction. “One of the pain points of technology commercialisation for entrepreneurs is developing an early proof-of-concept. An entrepreneur invests his entire capital into building a rock star product before getting market feedback and then goes out to the venture community. You can be sure that the VCs first question is going to be “where your proof-of-concept is and what did you learn from it?” says Professor Magill.
INSEAD students and Wild Code School worked on apps prototypes in mixed teams of 4 to 6. The objective was to showcase business ideas developed through the course and to be able to test them among a pool of first users – the much-craved proof-of-concept. On the Wild Code School side, participants were selected among Wilders from the school’s seven campuses. During two weeks, the teams worked on apps backlog and wireframes. The apps were developed during a 48-hour hackathon on December 9-11.
The winning team developped a video and swiping app to give feedback to a video presentation so the speaker knows when is public is engaged.
The winning team: Alban Delattre (Wild Code School), Clément Mezerette (Wild Code School), Han Jiang (INSEAD), Clémence Knaébel (INSEAD), Tiago Sommacal (INSEAD), Kartik Tikku (INSEAD)
