KANU wins first place in USASBE's 2022 national competition for experiential entrepreneurship education

At the 2022 annual conference of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) in Raleigh, North Carolina, a classroom exercise built on KANU won first place in the Entrepreneurship Experiential Education (3E) Competition, selected from 13 national finalists.

USASBE is the national community of entrepreneurship educators, and the 3E Competition exists to answer one question: which classroom experiences actually work, well enough that other teachers can pick them up and replicate them?

The winning exercise is Dr. Nancy Forster-Holt's “student side hustle” at the University of Rhode Island. Instead of asking students to imagine a business, the exercise asks them to run one. Students identify something the market around them actually needs, set up a real venture on KANU, find real customers, and operate through the semester. There is no hypothetical anywhere in the loop: the grade sits on top of a real business.

The award was shared by Dr. Forster-Holt together with KANU founders Ben Grossman and Andrew Bikash, both of whom built KANU as URI students, and the educators who adopted the model at their own institutions: Dr. John Wilson of Drexel University and Dr. Colleen Robb and Kelly Werder of Florida Gulf Coast University. That multi-campus spread was part of the point: the exercise won precisely because it travels. What worked in one classroom in Rhode Island worked at Drexel and Florida Gulf Coast too.

The model has also held up to academic scrutiny. Dr. Forster-Holt published peer-reviewed research on the exercise in Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy, USASBE's flagship journal, examining why students starting real ventures (“stimulation”) outperforms business-plan simulation as a learning model.

Four years on, this is still the idea KANU is built around. Simulation asks students to pretend. Real ventures ask them to perform, and produce something no simulation can: verified outcomes. Real customers, real revenue, a real record of what each student actually did. In 2022, the national body of entrepreneurship educators looked at 13 of the best experiential exercises in the country and put that model first.