Mentor Me E-Learning Program by Go Negosyo

Together let us build a country of enterprising Filipino youth today

Go Negosyo is now in progress to incorporate Mentor-Me E-Learning, a practical online entrepreneurship program in partnership with Singapore Polytechnic, with colleges and universities nationwide. Go Negosyo targets 150 schools this year that can be rolled as micro-entrepreneurs. Joey Concepcion, Presidential Adviser for Entrepreneurship and Go Negosyo founder, cited some of the successful digital enablers like Grab, Angkas and Honestbee, where the students can have a platform to integrate business-model opportunities for digitalization. He encouraged the schools, partners, and mentors to create an opportunity to create business and to get a better life.

“Mentor Me E-Learning is an inclusive 15-week e-learning program that will provide students from partner schools a platform to be entrepreneurial and learn relevant business, technical and creative skill sets needed to start, sustain and scale-up a business.” – Go Negosyo

The Fourth Industrial Revolution – Digitalization is changing. We stand on the borders of technological innovation that will radically reshape the way we work, the quality of life and our relations with one another. The 4th IR potentially boosts the global income levels. To date, the major gainers from it are the consumers/end-users who are able to access the digital sphere. Digitalization has conceived contemporary products and services with increased positive effects on efficiency and customer satisfaction. Booking a flight/ride, ordering groceries, streaming a movie, online payments, listening to music, and playing online games — any of these goods and services can now be done remotely.

Mr. Concepcion mentioned Vloggers as influencers in terms of managing advertisements. Brand names are shifting away from traditional media as these companies know the importance of “shareability.” “For better reach by a creative person, that is the future. The platform changes, this is an opportunity for the youth. Disrupting for offline but adoptive for online,” he said.

The program was designed as a pro-poor platform. To speed up on digitalization, some of the traditional Philippine enterprises may not be ready, but the younger generation will bring up the ideas and new technology. To help reach thousands of students, critical components and a great deal of mentorship are required. Go Negosyo is targeting 700 mentors to participate with the universities and colleges in running the program. They [industry mentors] will serve as supplements for entrepreneurship students, in addition to the academic mentors. Both mentors will help the students in their progress in the program in school, which is also a way to market their [students] skills directly to the market. The first adopters for Mentor Me E-Learning are the Isabela State University, followed by Lyceum of the Philippines University Batangas  and Thames International Entrepreneurs School of Asia.

SPInOff (Singapore Polytechnic Innovation Office)-Lexicon.The blended program will run for 15-weeks with required 4 checkpoints (face-to-face meetings), while the rest of the learnings will be based online which brings the student from ideation to demo day. It consists of Core Modules and Elective Modules with two (2) mentors per team. The content and case studies are uniquely designed by Singapore Polytechnic and are purely ASEAN-based. Neelesh Bhatia, Director of Spinoff, asserts, “We wanted to figure out a way where we don’t want to teach entrepreneurship, because entrepreneurship cannot be taught, you have to experience it, you have to get your hands dirty. And this is the other challenge we find, most of the schools we’ve seen when they run entrepreneurship programs – students go to the classroom, there is a lecturer like me, who will talk to the students about various business concepts , there will be case studies that we will be debating on. At the end of it, you will submit a business plan and that’s about it, that’s entrepreneurship. Students don’t get to experience what it takes to be a start-up. A lot of students that I’ve spoken to over the years want to start up for the wrong reasons, they want to be rich, they want to be their own boss, but nobody tells me that I want to solve a problem. So, our entire program is based on problems, how do you solve a problem that can work them into opportunity, into a solution, build a business model around it and then only when you’re ready to make a prototype (continuously) all the way until demo day where you present to a team of real investors.”

Students do not just come to a classroom: they work in groups of 4 and typically could come from any field and not be limited to business students only. Entrepreneurship doesn’t need to just come from the business side. It could be from Engineering, from IT, or from Chemical lab sciences Entrepreneurship is the great equalizer: you can be rich, you can be poor, old or young, you all go to the same challenges.

Entrepreneurial Mindset. Neelesh Bhatia presented the Spinoff-Lexicon objectives and its academic outline to schools, mentors, and partners. SPINOFF is an acronym for Singapore Polytechnic Innovation Office. The Mentor Me e-Learning rate for students is S$15 (approx. PHP600), targeting 1,000 students per school (for smaller schools, partnerships between schools are encouraged). The Spinoff team will administer a free training for mentors [Train the Trainer Program] for a maximum of three (3) days, with the school providing them with the required logistics. Spinoff doesn’t allow schools to run this as a strict online program: it is blended and there has to be face-to-face mentoring. The aim of the program is not to tell students you should start a company. The idea is to equip the worker bees with design thinking. To work with a problem into an opportunity, into a solution, into a business model, building a product, developing an entire sales and marketing strategy, product development timeline and budget, and ultimately pitching it to the customer — these are the end goals. In the end, this program focuses on building the entrepreneurial mindset of the students for an entrepreneurial future of the Philippines.

The Mentor Me E-Learning info session was held at JoeCon Hall in RFM Corporate Center in Mandaluyong City last January 14, 2019.

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