The Next Step for Cooperative Education
Abstract: At the early stages of startups development they need to change. They must change and adapt to the market. As the young entrepreneurs learn more about their business, their market, and their customers they need to incorporate that knowledge into their business plan. The business plan at that stage of development in the author’s opinion is a dynamic document that keeps evolving until it reaches a state of maturity. And even then there is a level of adaptation takes place based on the changes in the market, technology and other external factors like policies and regulations. On the other hand most of our funding and startups help programs assume all applicants to be at the final state of maturity (there are few programs target the early stages of development) which put young startups at a great disadvantage and they are automatically disqualified in being part of these programs. The author believes that this requirement is just a filtering process to make sure that funds are allocated to mature ideas where there is a higher probability of success. This model is working to a degree, but the question is how many good ideas are disregarded due to the lack of support or the environment to foster them. Many young startups especially in the IT field fail to continue beyond their first year due to the lack of support regardless of the idea. Young entrepreneurs will have to go back to the job search engines to start new career and abandon their ideas no matter how good they are. In this article the author will suggest a model on how post-secondary educational institutes can build that support in their programs and help new entrepreneurs reach the level of maturity to be qualified for other programs. The author will demonstrate that with an experiment conducted by the department of Accounting and Computer Education at Red River College. The author proposes the utilization of the co-op and project terms offered by many programs to help entrepreneurs’ idea cross the gap between the moment of the inception of that idea and the point when they are qualified for other programs.
Date of Publication: October 2015
Author: Haider Al-Saidi