The MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp—A Desire for Community

It probably all begins with a desire to do more, be more, and connect with something bigger: that’s the common denominator that starts to connect those who enroll in the MITx Entrepreneurship courses on edX. These MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are centered around Bill Aulet’s global bestseller ‘Disciplined Entrepreneurship’ and made available to prospective students worldwide through the open-source, non-profit platform known as edX.

Taking this to the next level: for those students who decide they might fancy crowning their learning journey with a hands-on, full-immersion, larger-than-life experience in entrepreneurial intensity, MIT offers the very selective MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp.  This consists in a six-day stint that defies all laws of time and space restriction, where participants leave behind their notions of physical and mental limitation and learn to work in teams to build a new venture from scratch, from the business plan up until the final pitch on Demo Day in front of a panel of Investors and Business Angels. Access to this Bootcamp is extremely exclusive (when I applied in 2016, over 200,000 candidates enrolled in the MOOCs, 760 applied to Bootcamp, and only 73 candidates were selected to attend.)

The blast of knowledge and depth of friendships formed within a week are just two of the magnetic qualities of MIT’s Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp.  ‘Drinking from the MIT firehose’ barely touches the sides in describing it. Blend the cultural richness of the participants (over 36 countries of origin, ages ranging from 17 to 55 years, from all sorts of educational backgrounds and walks of life) with the caliber of the speakers and mentors and the result is a life-changing, unforgettable week.

Bootcampers learn from world-class MIT Senior Lecturers, who personify the MIT motto “Mens et Manus” (translates from the Latin to “Mind and Hand”) by being first and foremost doers, before they are teachers: an array of legendary entrepreneurs who share priceless tips and insights not only about the business side, but perhaps more importantly, about their very human and courageous attitudes to challenge and adversity.

The Bootcamp experience fosters grit. The explosive combination of circumstance, fatigue, and tension pits its participants against one another in an extreme test of endurance, resilience, and character.  Bootcamp gradually and literally takes the individual apart, to a point that almost seems of no return. And then each student is reborn from a hopeless, desperate and delirious bundle of raw nerves, to suddenly blossom into their new potential.  The breathtaking flow of teamwork perfection on the last day is a truly sensational and mind-boggling experience.

Bootcampers are left with a desire for something more, a continued and ongoing connection with their new “family”.  The Bootcamp Alumni community is currently growing at the rate of several hundreds of new graduates per year.  Bootcampers typically reach out to each other to meet up during their travels, or to ask for shared intelligence, even across cohorts.  The Bootcamp experience as a common background is truly a glue that has the potential to hold the community together.

However, the flip side of the coin is that over time some factors are also slowly but inevitably undermining the community fabric: fragmentation, and the gravitational pull back towards “normal life”.  As I perceive it, and from the research I have been conducting since 2016, the escalating pain points experienced by Bootcamp Alumni over time include: disconnect from the pack and from the Bootcamp team, disconnect between cohorts, loss of the sense of the whole (and therefore, of the tangible sense of belonging), a fragmentation of communications (see Image 2), and lost opportunities to connect, collaborate, share, listen, ask/get, provide coordinated support for each other, meet up, and create successful group events.

The stories we hear from each other every day continue to inspire us, and sharing them has a multiplier effect in terms of inspiration, motivation, and community awareness.  Paving our entrepreneurial course in life can be lonely, and as humans, we are hard-wired to need a supportive ecosystem.  Community presence and support are heartwarming in the deepest sense, and incredibly powerful. There is a need to keep reaching across to the farthest parts of the globe: our geographical and cultural diversity is both our strength and our greatest challenge.

It is fair to say that for every Bootcamp that has taken place, a handful of passionate Alumni have attempted to find solutions to keep the community alive and connected. There is no shortage of past experiments, that have each provided single valuable clues for the overall collective intelligence system: from Facebook groups to Messenger group chats, newsletters, prototype platforms, surveys, forums, spreadsheets, and maps.  Images 3-7 below show some of the prototypes that I designed and tested during my action research period spanning 2016-2017.

All of the above failed but were valuable lessons learned in understanding what worked and what didn’t. This has led up to what we have today, which is still far from being a complete and all-encompassing solution, but which can be seen as a “reasonably sustainable model of space-holding” for disciplined community dialogue.  In the next article, we will look at the tools and platform we have built for ourselves to create and hold space for continuing to connect and build together.

This is the 1st of 5 articles adapted for the Disciplined Entrepreneurship website, from an original article published recently by Rachel Hentsch on Medium, also with extracts from articles on Bootcamp co-authored in 2016 by Rachel Hentsch and Sally Coldrick.