During our teacher workshops on the AQA Unit 1 (BUSS1) course, we tried out a new resource -a collection of 20 mini (A5-sized) case studies on business start-ups. During the workshops, we’ve asked AQA business teachers for their suggestions on how the mini briefs might be used as part of the BUSS1 course delivery. Here are the suggestions:
GENERAL ACTIVITIES
- Produce a quiz on the mini briefs - get the students to come up with the questions
- Picking out key terms - highlight the main BUSS1 terms and get students to write a definition for them
- Produce a SWOT analysis of the case study business
- “It depends on” - identify the main factors that will determine whether the case study start-up will be successful
- Report on why this start-up business has been successful
- Write a brief, fictional account of how a selected case study start-up will develop in the future
- Use the mini briefs as “top trumps” cards, ranking them in terms of certain attributes (e.g. score for strength of idea, finance raised)
- Produce a wall display on selected case studies and encourage students to add items to it during the course
- In pairs or small groups, students track news items on the case studies
- Students produce a brief written piece on what they would, have done differently if their were the entrepreneur concerned
- “What happens next”? Describe the likely future for the business (link with BUSS2)
DRAGONS DEN STYLE ACTIVITIES
- Which start-up would you invest in, and why?
- Students take the role of the Dragons and, using Monopoly money, decide how much they would invest in each business
- If you were a Dragon (or other private investor / business angel), what information would you want to know about the start-up before deciding whether to invest?
- Take a case study and ask students to create a pitch to potential franchisees (i.e. how might be idea by franchised?)
EXAM-STYLE ACTIVITIES
- Essay questions that focus on AO3 - identifying strategies for growth AO4 - evaluating those strategies
- Students take one mini brief and produce some exam-style questions for that case study. They then produce an outline mark scheme for their questions
FOCUSING ON SPECIFIC SPECIFICATION / AREAS
- Advantages and disadvantages of the business organisation & structure for each start-up
- Identify the likely aims and objectives of the entrepreneurs concerned when they set up the business
- Assessing the relative strengths of each start-up
- Characteristics of the featured entrepreneurs - how do they differ? What drives them?
- Assess the importance of the gap in the market
- Analyse the market in which the case study start-up operates - is it growing?
- Describe how the mini brief case studies approached market research
- Identify possible sources of failure for selected case studies - what might go wrong?
- Looking at the problems faced by the case studies, what challenges will they face in the future? (short-term / long-term)
- Introduce external factors using a “chance card” - how might the start-up be affected by this factor?
- Develop a simple, fictional business plan based on a selected mini brief
- Focusing on marketing for a start-up, which of the four P’s is most important for the case study in question
- How might the marketing strategies for a selection of mini briefs differ and why?
- Create a customer profile for one of the start-ups - who buys and why?
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