Babson Professor Heidi M. Neck and Alumnus Anton Yakushin ’08 have launched an educational tech company called VentureBlocks, created to serve as a new and innovative resource for higher entrepreneurial education. The company’s first educational “block”, ‘The Nanu Challenge’, was officially released in January 2015.
The Nanu Challenge is an immersive 3-D simulation for customer and opportunity discovery meant to be played as part of a related classroom curriculum. Within the gaming experience, students are given the opportunity to interview consumers and develop insights by identifying their needs. By role-playing within the fictional setting of a small town called Trepton, students assume the role of a nascent entrepreneur pursuing a potential business opportunity, and learn the necessary habits and skill-set it’ll take to make it as a successful entrepreneur outside of the classroom.
