Mr. Chocolate and the Effectual Entrepreneur: A Life Cycle Story

This is a story of an entrepreneur and his journey to find a scalable business. It is based on real life, and moves step by step through the entrepreneurial process. At every stage in the life cycle of this journey, you will be asked what you think our entrepreneur should do. As the story unfolds, you’ll learn about the concept of effectuation, a process by which our entrepreneur discovers what to do next by just starting with what he’s got, trying, and failing, and trying again until something sticks. You’ll help him identify the challenges and resources he could consider as he moves from ideation through intention to prototype, pilot, results, then profitability, hopefully becoming market established. What lessons did he learn, and what do you think about his chances for eventual success? This series of “compact cases” can be used in any introductory entrepreneurship or marketing class.