Key takeaways
- Professors and students use the PRFAQ Framework to think critically about their entrepreneurship, innovation, or strategy class projects, articulate the story clearly, and inspire their team to act.
- Students write their PRFAQ to create a better class artifact.
- The PRFAQ is the best tool for startup competitions to standardize teams’ applications, improve the screening and selection process, and prepare teams to deliver a powerful story.
PRFAQ is an effective activity for entrepreneurship, innovation, and strategy professors to teach undergrad and grad students. The framework and the method to write a PRFAQ encourages critical and deep thinking, and it helps students develop writing, storytelling, communication, analytical, and persuasion skills. These skills and the framework itself are valuable when they join the workforce or follow a research/academic path.
Today’s professors have to use tools created forty to seventy years ago, such as business plans and presentations (that started with overhead projectors). Professors are eager to teach practical skills that their students will value and use after college, yet most student will never write a business plan after leaving college. The standard business plans templates are too broad and open. They cause writer’s block on students, which leads to anxiety and poor performance. Pitch decks for entrepreneurship, innovation, or strategy classes are too formulaic as well. It doesn’t help students fully communicate their ideas and they resort to shallow bullet points. Professors also need to account for those who desire to become founders vs. those who desire to work for corporations and drive innovation and entrepreneurship form within (”intrapreneurs”).
The faculty and program directors organizing business plan, innovation, or startup competitions also struggle with the quality of the applicants. There is inconsistency in the style, format, and content of each applicant team. It makes screening and selecting challenging. When there is an in-person demo or booth style pitch, the teams stumble to answer questions they haven’t considered. The organizers don’t know how or don’t have the time to coach teams on how to apply or present their ideas.
The PRFAQ format is a perfect tool to teach students practical skills they can use for their rest of their professional lives, regardless if they are the founder of a startup, leaders and managers in a corporation, nonprofit, or government agency, or they will follow a research/academic path. The PRFAQ encourages clear, concise, and coherent writing. It provides the right amount of guardrails and prompts for students to exert creativity without feeling lost. It develops deep and critical thinking about the problem, the solution, and the key elements of the innovation they are proposing. It works for new business, products, or programs in for-profits organizations, nonprofits, and government agencies, freeing them to pick whatever idea they want to propose. This exercise also helps students develop storytelling and pitching skills without feeling like they are rehearsing a strict presentation flow.
For university competitions, the PRFAQ helps the teams applying and the organizer. The framework assists the teams to think clearly about the opportunity they are presenting. The writing, reviewing, and revising that goes along with creating a PRFAQ is an exercise in formulating a compelling story, which leads to better prepared teams. For the organizers, it speeds up the screening and selection process. It also helps with a fairer and more equitable selection process based on the merits of the idea. If competitors present on stage or have walk-in booths, they will deliver better pitches. The overall
The PRFAQ format brings many benefits for professors and students. Because of its strict 6-page rule, professors are able to read and evaluate each paper in under thirty minutes. Because of its structured format, it also makes it easier for professors to find what is missing and oversights by the student. Students will find they spend more time and energy towards the content of their idea, instead of struggling with writer’s block. They will gain a valuable skill for their professional career.
===
Who’s this for?
University and college professors of entrepreneurship, innovation, strategy, venture capital, marketing, or classes that require students to write business plans, create pitch decks, or evaluate them.
What makes a PRFAQ great for professors and students?
PRFAQs provide the right balance between creative freedom and structure for students to do their best in describing their innovation. Professors have standardized papers to grade, making their jobs faster and fairer.
Who are the collaborators for the PRFAQ?
Students collaborate with each other to write their PRFAQs documents. They reach to friends and other students in the fields they are writing about (e.g., engineering, pharmacy, construction, climate, etc.). They can also reach out to domain experts within the university or in the industry who’ll be excited about the format and help them think through innovation.
Who do they share the PRFAQ?
Students share their PRFAQ with their professor. If they want to take this a step further, they can keep working on the PRFAQ after the class is over and use it to pitch to investors, for grants, or to talk to other co-founders/contributors to execute their idea. It’s the perfect format to take to a business plan or startup competition.
When is it not appropriate to use a PRFAQ?
PRFAQs are not an appropriate framework to use as a retrospective, such as a case study. It’s also not fit for a snapshot of an organization, unless it’s about discussing a pivot or strategy shift.
