Team Academy: Business Model Innovation course

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It's 2035. You're a successful entrepreneur, traveling to the Moon. You lift a telescope to your eye and look back at Earth.

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What do you see? What impact have you had?

That's the question Cor Noltee and I opened with when we rewrote and taught the course Business Model Innovation at Team Academy in Amsterdam: 56 hours centered around three intensive days, each combining a 2-hour online lecture in the morning with a 2-hour hands-on workshop in the afternoon.

The goal was to help students become Future Entrepreneurs: someone who designs a new product, service, or business model under uncertain circumstances — for a better future.

We didn't want students to leave with just another canvas template. We wanted them to leave with a different lens on what a "successful" business actually means — one that includes the planet and the people in it, not just the balance sheet.

To get there, we built the course around the Triple Diamond model: three cycles of diverging and converging thinking that move students from why to how to what.

Day 1 — WHY: Exploring Needs and Opportunities

After that Moon exercise and a deep dive into the key dimensions of today's polycrisis, we asked students to dream boldly and finish one sentence:

"It would be fantastic if…"

That sentence became the seed for their entire business model.

From there, students mapped the ecosystem around the challenge they'd chosen — not just the human actors, but the non-human ones too, and the web of relationships and interdependencies connecting them all. Seeing the whole system, rather than a single product-market fit, is what opens the door to innovation that tackles root causes instead of symptoms.

Throughout Day 1, students stepped into different design roles: the dreamer who imagines what could be, the awakener who confronts uncomfortable truths, and the mapper who visualizes the system.

"Whenever I think about my business, I will now also think about Mother Earth. We normally only think about our own future, but when the Earth is not healthy, we also do not have a future." — Course student

"I liked the extra activities in class, the physical exercises. You asked: what is the dream for the future? I started out saying I wanted to buy a red Ferrari — that was the beginning of my thinking. But the further the course went, I understood this isn't what the world needs from me." — Course student

"If I say this was the best workshop I've ever had, it's true. I love the place I come from most, but I never thought about how I could improve it and help the environment. Now I have a business plan to reduce air pollution there." — Course student

 

 

Day 2 — HOW: Exploring Ideas and Experiments

During Day 2 we turned the dreams into ideas and experiments. As part of becoming an evidence gatherer, students picked two personas from their system map: one human, one non-human. To help them think from a non-human perspective, Cor lay down on the floor and played the role of the soil, while I interviewed him about his feelings, his aspirations, his pains — what he thought about intensive farming. The students then did the same, acting out and interviewing each other's non-human personas to understand how their business models ripple out to affect Mother Earth in ways they'd never considered.

Next, as question makers, students turned their insights into sharp "How might we…" questions. Then, as idea generators, we played a game called the Super Optimist: one person shares an idea, and everyone else claps, cheers, and shouts "That's fantastic! AND…" before building on it further. No shooting down, only building up — until you have ten strong ideas on the table.

"Normally as entrepreneurs we only think about the money and growth, but we don't think about Mother Earth. In this course we also had to think about non-human personas, which was new to us — normally we only think about humans." — Course student

"I have two main takeaways: I have to think about future generations and the future world. And two: I have to go through divergence, and then, with evidence and experimenting, I can converge." — Course student

 

 

Day 3 — WHAT: Building Prototypes and Improving

On the final day, students became idea evaluators. They built an idea flyer and rated their concept — not only on the usual feasibility and viability, but against a broader set of value maps: wellbeing, sufficiency, resilience, and other social and environmental indicators. Suddenly, "is this a good idea?" became a much richer question.

Then, as experimenters, they built prototypes and tested them live in class. We talked about failing fast and learning faster, using what we call the 111,111 rule: 1 point for an idea, 10 for writing it down, 100 for researching it, 1,000 for the prototype, 10,000 for testing it — and, as the improver, the reminder that feedback is worth the most of all: 100,000 points, every time.

"The most important thing I learned is you have to make a prototype. You may think it's useful, but you have to test it in the real world. My prototype didn't work, but I got a lot of feedback — so it wasn't a failure." — Course student

"The value maps helped me think beyond business metrics and consider social and environmental values. I used that feedback to improve my idea." — Course student

"This project taught me that design thinking isn't about finding the perfect idea immediately. It's about understanding systems, testing assumptions, and improving through feedback. The dream can stay the same while the solution evolves — that's what makes design thinking such a powerful process." — Course student

 

 

Why this matters

Watching this unfold, Cor and I were amazed by watching students' definition of "success" shift in real time. By the end of three days, Ferraris had turned into business plans for cleaner air. Ecosystem maps had turned into genuine empathy for soil, for future generations, for actors who don't get a seat at most boardroom tables.

We designed the course deliberately to make this shift happen — diverging before converging, feeling before evaluating, testing before perfecting.

 

Bring this course to your students

If you're at an HBO institution or university and want your students to leave with more than a canvas — with a genuinely different way of seeing business, systems, and their own responsibility in them — we'd love to talk.

Whether you want the full three-day format, a condensed workshop, or a custom version built around your program's goals, get in touch. Let's give your students the telescope moment too.