Flourishing Business Canvas in Entrepreneurship Education and Research

For our twenty sixth monthly flourishing business community speaker series,: stories from the field, the community is delighted to welcome Dr. Larry Clay a professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy from the College of Business, Innovation, Leadership, and Technology (BILT) at Marymount University, based just outside Washington D.C. in the United States of America.  Dr. Clay is also on the board of directors of the Flourishing Enterprise Co-lab.

The Flourishing Enterprise Co-lab is grateful for the support of Social Innovation at Georgian College, Ontario, Canada, to put on our speaker series. 

Dr. Clay’s work integrates teaching, research, and executive advising to prepare leaders to build flourishing enterprises and communities.  As an educator, he is leading the development of a campus-wide entrepreneurship program that positions entrepreneurship as a core capability for all students.  In the Doctor of Business Administration in Business Intelligence, he advises and chairs executive doctoral candidates, guiding them in qualitative and quantitative research design and helping them translate advanced analytics and design science into actionable strategies for organizations.  As a researcher he is a National Science Foundation-funded innovation researcher focused on designing sustainable and flourishing innovation ecosystems that connect entrepreneurship, quantum-informed management, and human-centered design.

Dr. Clay uses the Flourishing Business Canvas (FBC) in his undergraduate “Introduction to Entrepreneurship” course as a core learning instrument that helps students from all majors see how their disciplinary knowledge, cultural backgrounds, and personal interests are embedded in and essential to the entrepreneurial and creative process.  By converging diverse ideas within the FBC’s holistic framework, he activates two key drivers of entrepreneurship, connections and conversations, guiding students to co-create venture concepts that integrate social, environmental, and economic flourishing as well as individual human flourishing.   

In these trainer-focused contexts, he emphasizes intelligent facilitation design, which aligns the FBC workshop approach with space and modality (paper canvases, large-format posters, digital platforms, team breakouts, bricolage activities), so that the structure of the experience itself models flourishing, contribution, and creative collaboration that also enhances the individual flourishing mindset.

Dr. Clay’s presentation will respond to the following questions:

• How did Dr. Clay build his own knowledge of the FBC and gain confidence to apply it in his teaching and research?
• Reaction of his colleagues towards the idea of Flourishing Business Models
• Challenges for the students and the entrepreneurs applying the Canvas
• Pedagogical and andragogical insights so far - what is exciting and challenging as a teacher and researcher
• What does Dr. Clay hope to gain from participating in the Flourishing Business Community?
• What can Dr. Clay offer to the community?

At the end of his talk Dr. Clay will take questions from members of the community.

F or more details please see this blog post.