Want just the highlights?

Watch these 1-minute clips if you don’t have time yet for the full discussions below ▾

Innovation talent for an Alberta downturn

“How the hell is your school doing that?!”

“Better student ideas. Hands down. Period.”

Engaging students while still in high school

Most of your students’ ideas suck, don’t they? Or you don’t have enough of them, do you? What if you could pretty easily change that?

Like our colleagues below, you can use these tools, processes, and the online textbook – for better ideas, to deliver the rigorous foundations at the intersection of theory and practice, for a more experiential learning environment, and for a more entrepreneurially engaged campus.

Matthew Rogers-Draycott: Masters and undergraduate levels both online and off

Doan Winkel: Using the tools as a textbook across multi-disciplinary university sections

Mark Turner and Nikki Johnston: Engaging students deeply in a high school setting

Kevin Crowe: Building top in-demand talent, a tech business where the best ideas win,
and a winning path out of an oil and gas downturn in Alberta, Canada

  • 0:00 – Who is Kevin Crowe, Executive VP Strategy at Long View Systems?
  • 0:47 – What problem were you trying to solve?
  • 1:48 – What were you doing before, and what’s changed?
  • 3:08 – How did you build a business where the best ideas win?
  • 4:26 – What kinds of outcomes have you seen?
  • 5:19 – How did all of this improve your team dynamics and culture?
  • 6:45 – Did it really turn ‘innovation’ from a talking point into action?
  • 7:58 – Can you give us an example of something tangible you stood up?
  • 9:01 – Do you have a message for leaders trying to make innovation real?
  • 10:28 – How will it fit within my context?
  • 11:09 – How quickly can someone make this happen?

We’ve learned a lot the hard way – from our own entrepreneurial and teaching experiences, from the world’s top innovators, and from the best of the literature.

Import it all into your context. Get your students levelling up to accelerate their learning. Use your class time in smarter ways. Make things experiential while building an entrepreneurial culture. Let us help you make it all look easy.

Hi, I’m Alex Bruton!

I still remember the day – over a decade ago now. A new semester was starting up and I was supposed to teach my students using the business model canvas and the business plan. And I was under pressure for my students to be coming up with and working on better, more impactful, and, ideally, more fundable ideas.

For sure I’d tweaked some stuff in the break between semesters, but in my heart I knew it wasn’t going to work. Three months later, my students’ ideas would still mostly suck …

The roots of the Idea Maker Course were born in that moment. I knew I could do better by my students. I knew I could give them a better foundation both for my own course and for what would follow – in our program and in the world around us.

The approaches have improved a lot since then, and they’re the result of practical experience and the best of what’s found in the literature.

I use these approaches myself all the time and have worked with thousands of entrepreneurial students and their teachers. They’re used by thousands of educators at hundreds of schools and universities from Waterloo, to Mexico, to the USA, to the UK. They’ve won national and international awards. And they’ve formed the basis of many entrepreneurial ventures and corporate innovation practices, including my own.

I’ve been tenured in a business school and in an engineering school, I’ve been invited to teach around the world, and I’ve been fortunate to be named a Peak Scholar and a Master Educator for this work, as well as Entrepreneurial Educator of the Year in Canada.

I’m so honored to have worked with Mike and to be able to share all of this with you here in the form of top-shelf tools and frameworks, and a modern ‘textbook’. You can take inspiration from it yourself. You can assign it to your students – e.g. to flip the class for better ideas and deeper more meaningful learning experiences. You can use it as the basis of a challenge or competition, and/or for coaching your most promising leaders to a better future. Or, better yet, you can let them at it themselves and get them driving forward while you get out of the way and do your best to support their journeys.

Thank you so very much for being here!

mike le

And I’m Mike Le!

I met Alex a bunch of years ago now through one of his past students who was then a business partner of mine. And even though I’d been an entrepreneur several times and coached hundreds of entrepreneurs through my own web marketing company over the years, I knew that Alex was onto something special.

He wasn’t like any teacher I’d ever had. His classes weren’t like the classes I’d disliked so much when I was in school. And his tools were super practical. They really worked.

It was clear from the start that the stuff we’ve now built into The Idea Maker Course was filling an important gap between hunch and implementation.

It was helping people avoid wasting their time and money on the wrong things. It was literally accelerating their experience gaining and boosting their success.

And it’s been such a pleasure applying both my entrepreneurial and web skills to help Alex get this kind of experience to others.

For my part, I knew in my early twenties that I didn’t want to work in the corporate world anymore and wanted to do the things that I was passionate about. As I set out on my own I can tell you that I made more than my share of mistakes on the journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Mistakes that no amount of business models, business plans, or dynamic guest lectures would have helped me avoid. I needed the tools, approaches, and practical real-world embeddedness that we’ve baked into the Idea Maker Course.

I’m truly hoping that what you find on these pages will help you help your students do some great learning and go on to design their best ventures and live their best lives.

Here’s to you teaching a super course!

mike-signature

Adopt the Idea Maker Course

Students use a single code to register themselves, which keeps it super simple for them and for your teaching team. Their access never expires. And it’s managed using the most up to date secure social login technologies available, i.e. so we don’t see or store a password or their personal information beyond a name and email address.

Faculty member access never expires either and opens up six weeks before confirmed adoption by groups of ten or more learners. Same goes for staff in academic centres, incubators, or event teams.

We offer educational bundles. And, on a rolling basis, we run full free trial periods for educators. These are currently scheduled for early January and early May.

There are several ways to make it happen:

This course is undergoing an upgrade and is not available for enrollment at this time. Thank you for your understanding.