Graduate students mentoring undergraduate students’ business innovation pitches: Article 100390

Pitch competitions are commonplace throughout undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship curricula. Although they are valuable exercises, advancements are available to further their usefulness and reach a wider audience. Accordingly, we developed an experiential learning exercise rooted in the tenets of corporate entrepreneurship that allows for greater collaboration, learning, and critical thinking. In the exercise, undergraduate student groups develop and present an innovative initiative, then are scored and mentored by MBA student groups prior to the final pitches. The benefits include improved student learning by undergraduate students from graduate student mentors as well as improved mentoring and leadership skills for graduate students through the practical and experiential process of helping undergraduate students improve their pitches.