The Disciplined Entrepreneurship Toolbox
Stay ahead by using the 24 steps together with your team, mentors, and investors.
The books
This methodology with 24 steps and 15 tactics was created at MIT to help you translate your technology or idea into innovative new products. The books were designed for first-time and repeat entrepreneurs so that they can build great ventures.
Ever since I started as the Managing Director of the Trust Center some 17 years ago (!), we have produced an Annual Report to document what we do—not just to our donors and stakeholders, but also to ourselves and the community. It is a non-trivial investment to create. It reminds us of the broad impact we have created and forces us to reflect on the coherence and alignment of our work.
I learned this practice at IBM, where at the end of each year we wrote a “Value Add” letter to our clients summarizing what we had done that year. By concisely summarizing the year (where things are so often forgotten), it highlighted how we were so much more than just another hardware vendor. It justified their choosing to do business with us, even though our prices were higher than other hardware vendors.
At the beginning of my tenure here at the Trust Center, these annual reports were so painful to do because we barely had enough resources to do our basic jobs. I wrote every word and even did the design and layout. That being said, I found them to be extraordinarily valuable, and they helped us secure more resources and get out of the day-to-day survival mode. It is like the wisdom gained when you hear someone say “I don’t have time to get organized,” and you realize that this is the wrong perspective. Make the investment and get out of the hole!
Annual Reports paid dividends throughout the year—not just with donors, but with all stakeholders. They allowed us to be explicit about what we do and don’t do. The process forced discipline on us and gave us pride in our progress. It began to differentiate us from others.
About 8 years ago, we had the wonderful fortune of having the incredibly talented Greg Wymer join our center as the Marketing and Communications Director. He picked up the responsibility to lead the Annual Report development and production, bringing it to a whole new level of content and design.
Each year features a new theme and an eye-catching design (UI matters). Last year it was “Yes You Can!” This year it is appropriately, “Raising the Bar.”
We are extremely proud of this document as it reminds us and shows the incredible depth and breadth of the impact our small but extraordinarily mighty team accomplished in 12 months. But it is not meant to be a “show off” document nearly as much as it is meant to be a guide or blueprint for others who want to learn from what we have done. The explicit mission of MIT is to create a body of knowledge and share that knowledge with the world so we can address the world’s most pressing challenges.
Our contribution to that body of knowledge is the wisdom we have gained about entrepreneurship from all the experiments we have run and iterated on—some of which have worked and some that have not. So we proudly present our latest 2024 Annual Report to help “Raise the Bar” for entrepreneurship education everywhere.
Because if you are an entrepreneurship educator, we are on the same team. We hope you enjoy it, find it useful, share it, and copy it for your situation and context. That would make us very happy.
