experiential-learning
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Deepak Menaria and the education of a useful mistake
In Nagpur, the founder of Lemon Ideas has spent years giving aspiring entrepreneurs room to try. His classroom can look suspiciously like a business - complete with customers, consequences and the occasional instructive blunder.
Mike Vaughan and the trouble with a perfect answer
A pole-balancing printer, two early learning businesses, and a career spent testing what people do with what they know. The Regis Company co-founder keeps returning to the same question: how does better thinking develop?
Beau Leese and the first-experience problem
Before a graduate can get a job, someone has to let them do the work. Practera co-founder Beau Leese has spent years making that first opportunity easier to organise - and harder to reserve for the well connected.
Clover Venture puts the CV on trial
A hackathon gave Clover Venture a clue: companies could see ideas, but struggled to see the skills behind them. Its answer pairs real business challenges with software that makes those skills easier to act on.
IVB gives students a year to build a business. And ₹1 lakh to begin.
At Chennai’s Institute of Venture Building, the timetable moves from classrooms to companies to a startup of your own. The intriguing part is how much of college it asks students to leave behind.
Build It Up gives startups a team. The bill? Zero.
An Italian nonprofit pairs students with founders for six months of practical work. Its cleverest exchange is simple: startups need help, and students need something real to help with.
Exxat and the paperwork between a student and a patient
A database built to help a friend became a business serving 1,600+ academic programs. Exxat’s wager: the road from classroom to clinic gets shorter when everyone can see the same work.
Symplicity and the Trouble With the Second Login
A first job starts long before the application. Symplicity sells colleges the software for that untidy journey - and employers a way to meet the students making it.
The $80 Shortcut From Classroom Theory to Client Work
At Cal State Fullerton, a student chapter has built a practical answer to the entry-level experience trap: charge less than a textbook, open the room to every major, and put real clients on the other side of the table.
DBH’s $3,000 lesson in the real world
At San Jose State, Dwight Bentel & Hall Communications puts students in charge of real client campaigns. A Chevrolet brief, a theatre production and a campus sustainability program reveal what that education looks like when it leaves the classroom.
Lemon Ideas wants your startup pitch. English is optional.
From Nagpur, Lemon Ideas has built a startup contest, an entrepreneurship school and a mentoring network around a practical proposition: a promising founder can come from anywhere, and speak in their own language.
CEFE International makes business lessons leave the classroom
The German consultancy teaches entrepreneurship through practice, then trains people to teach it themselves. Its work reveals how much has to happen between a promising workshop and a stronger business.
TrepCamp’s real pitch: meet the people who might build with you
The founders of Nowports met at TrepCamp before building a billion-dollar logistics company. Inside the academy selling aspiring entrepreneurs a place to practice, find collaborators and test what comes next.
AmplifyME turns the trading floor into a job audition
The London company lets students try finance before applying for it. Banks get something useful in return: a record of how a would-be hire actually performs.
The Regis Company Spent 20 Years Building Simulations. Now AI Is Cutting the Cost by 90%.
Corporate training has long measured who finished the course. Regis built SimGate to measure what people do when the decision gets uncomfortable - and to make a once-bespoke format affordable enough to scale.
Lumivero Bought the Boring Software Experts Refuse to Quit - Now It Has to Make the Bundle Add Up
Lumivero assembled a cabinet of stubbornly useful research and risk tools. Its next test is whether a collection of specialist products can behave like one decision system without sanding off what made each one trusted.
John Fillmore Is Betting the Degree Needs a Workshop
After a decade helping Chegg scale, John Fillmore returned to the oldest problem in higher education: how to make a classroom feel more like the work waiting outside it.
Jodi McPherson Is Turning the First Rung of the Career Ladder Into Paid Work
After three decades in education technology, the Work Simplr founder is rebuilding early-career experience around a practical idea: give students real projects, pay them, and make the work count.
Mitch Gordon Put Freshman Year on a Passport
A teaching job in Taiwan became a career in global education. Now Verto Education's co-founder is trying to turn a semester abroad from an elective into the opening chapter of college.
The 107-Year-Old Campus House Selling Something Students Can’t Download
Hart House is part gym, theatre, gallery, restaurant, grantmaker and Gothic living room. Its next act is harder: modernize a century-old landmark without renovating away the social friction that makes it useful.
Mohawk College Turned the Community College Into an R&D Partner - Here’s the Playbook
The Hamilton college found a sharper edge than adding more courses: let students solve live industry problems, let employers borrow the labs, and make applied research part of the education rather than a campus side project.
Work Simplr Turned College Students Into a Delivery Engine - Can It Beat the Backlog?
The Denver company stopped selling access to young talent and started selling finished work. Its two-sided wager: a neglected business backlog can become a paid proving ground for students.
Peer-Tree Bet the Best Training Course Is Actually a Room Full of Peers
Most workplace learning platforms organize content. Peer-Tree organizes people around it - a useful bet for teams whose best lessons are trapped in colleagues' heads.
Major League Hacking Turned the All-Nighter Into a 5 Million-Person Developer Funnel
MLH started by putting rules, mentors and sponsor gear around chaotic campus hackathons. Now its real product is the moment a new developer stops watching tutorials and ships something - with a brand’s API inside it.
The $18,750 Bet That Your Best Freshman Dorm Is a Foreign City
Verto Education turned the awkward gap between high school and college into a five-city, credit-bearing product. The pitch is seductive; the fine print is where the actual business lives.
Junior Enterprises Turn Classrooms Into Client Work
Across Europe, student-run nonprofits are doing what lectures cannot: putting young people in charge of real clients, real decisions and real consequences.
A Minnesota College Made Curiosity a Spectator Sport
Gustavus is small by design, but its ambitions spill well beyond the classroom. The wager is that close mentorship, a guaranteed real-world experience, and one unusually public science conference can make a 1,900-student college feel larger than its headcount.
The College Where the Campus Is the Curriculum
On 27,000 acres in northwest Georgia, Berry College has turned a century-old work program into a modern career laboratory - and made the land itself part of the lesson.
byteXL
byteXL is a Hyderabad-based education-technology company that partners with engineering colleges and universities to make students job-ready. Through a hybrid model of on-campus training, a cloud-based coding platform and guided placement support, it teaches emerging technologies such as AI/ML, cloud computing, cybersecurity and full-stack development - focused largely on students in India's tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Founded in 2019 by brothers Karun and Sricharan Tadepalli, byteXL aims to bridge the gap between what colleges teach and what the IT industry hires for.
Podium Education
Podium Education is an Austin-based edtech company that partners with colleges and universities to close the gap between a degree and a first job. Its flagship product, the Global Career Accelerator, is a for-credit, fully online program in which undergraduates of any major work on real projects for companies like Intel, L'Oreal, OpenAI and the GRAMMYs, build in-demand skills in data, marketing and coding, and collaborate with peers from dozens of countries. After acquiring the early-career talent platform Untapped in 2024, Podium now also connects its students directly to employers, turning coursework into a hiring pipeline.