Before the Pitch

I brought Norwegian chocolate to a classroom in Vienna. I had thought it might help encourage participation. The conversation soon made that plan unnecessary.

As I wrote in my reflection on teaching at WU, the students and I talked about much more than customers and business models. We talked about democracy, freedom, relationships and LGBTQ+ life. These conversations stayed with me because they belonged in the room. A person preparing to build a business is also preparing to make decisions about other people’s lives. The classroom is one of the few places where there is still time to ask what those decisions should serve.

I think often about the moment before an idea becomes a pitch. Before the confident opening sentence. Before a problem is cut down to the size of a slide. At that stage, the story is still open. A team can still change whose difficulty it is trying to solve. It can still notice that the person paying and the person affected are not always the same person.

For a thought experiment, imagine a student team planning an app to reduce food waste. The first version sounds immediately attractive. Shops have unsold food. Customers want affordable meals. A phone can bring them together. It is easy to see why a class would welcome the idea. There is a recognisable problem, a plausible service, and something useful to build.

Now let someone ask about a customer who works late and cannot reach the collection point. Or a person without reliable access to a smartphone. Who gets the discounted meal? Who sorts the food, checks it and stays behind to hand it over? If an order goes wrong, who absorbs the loss? These questions do not ruin the idea. They bring the rest of its world into view.

The problem behind this imagined venture is large. UNEP estimated that 1.05 billion tonnes of food were wasted in 2022 across households, food services and retailers, including inedible parts. Households accounted for 60 percent. Those figures do not mean every discarded item can be rescued, or that an app can solve hunger. They make the need to think carefully more urgent. Good intentions need a clear understanding of the problem they hope to change.

A classroom can give that understanding time to grow. In the imagined exercise, another student might notice that the cheapest pickup window falls during a shift. Someone else might ask whether unsold food is predictable enough for a family to depend on. The original team now has a more difficult task, but also a more human one. The idea has acquired people with working hours, obligations and limits.

I want entrepreneurship education to make room for that kind of attention. It is a skill a student can practise before promises become contracts and before changing direction means asking someone else to bear the cost. A young founder should be able to question a promising plan without feeling that every question is evidence of a lack of ambition.

Education has not always prepared people for this work. In a 2021 UNESCO study of education plans and curriculum frameworks in close to fifty countries, more than half made no reference to climate change. In an accompanying online survey of roughly 1,600 teachers and education leaders, one third said environmental issues were absent from teacher training. These historical findings concern education broadly, rather than today’s business classrooms. They remind me that people can pass through years of formal learning without receiving much help in connecting practical decisions to the world around them.

There is something unfair about asking students to arrive with that connection already made. They are learning the language of business while also trying to imagine a future for themselves. If every celebrated example rewards speed, growth and certainty, they will understandably learn to sound fast, expansive and sure. A teacher’s choice of questions matters. So does the time allowed for an uncertain answer.

The student who hesitates may have noticed a person the rest of the team has overlooked. The student who changes the problem may be doing the most valuable work in the room. I want there to be space for both of them before the presentation has to look finished.

This does not make the practical questions disappear. A venture still needs customers and enough income to continue. But the way it earns that income starts taking shape very early. By the time a harmful arrangement has become routine, questioning it can feel like threatening everyone’s livelihood. A classroom offers an earlier opening, when a different choice is still cheap enough to try.

That is what I remember alongside the chocolate: the possibility of a room in which thinking could go further than the planned exercise. A good teaching day leaves students with something they can use. I hope it also leaves them with a question that returns when a real person is about to disappear behind a promising number.