Why it runs as a strand
Most technical education leaves business to the end: learn the skill for two years, then take a module about business plans. The result is people who can build things but cannot answer the first question a customer asks.
In the STEAM programmes, research and development, entrepreneurship, and business and financial literacy are taught together as one continuous thread, called the enterprise strand. It runs through every domain (subject area) and every stage of the Changemaker Journey.
The enterprise strand is part of the STEAM programmes. Separately from them, DreamSpace Academy also runs business and entrepreneurship training, startup bootcamps and a startup challenge.
- 1Research and developmentMake it work
- 2EntrepreneurshipMake it matter
- 3BusinessMake it last
The academy runs the strand all the way through, rather than adding it at the end. In its experience, entrepreneurship works as a network of support, not as a final stage. The things that help are the mentors, the introductions, the first buyer and the support that follows, and none of those fit into a closing module.
Research on entrepreneurial ecosystems finds the same. Whether new businesses start and do well depends on the conditions around them, more than on any single programme[34, 35].
What the strand covers
Research & development
Make it work. Careful, step-by-step investigation of a real problem.
- Research the problem: who has it, what already exists, why earlier attempts failed
- Form a hypothesis and design a way to test it
- Build a prototype, measure it, write down what happened
- Improve it based on the evidence, not on what the maker happens to prefer
This is the innovation in “innovation and enterprise”.
Entrepreneurship
Make it matter. Turning a tested solution into something people choose.
- Spotting opportunities, and finding out what customers or a community actually need
- A value proposition: who this is for and why they would choose it
- A simple business model, and the simplest version of the thing that is good enough to test
- Pitching, and connecting with mentors and funders
Mapped against the European entrepreneurship competence framework[36]. The same framework has been used to describe the skills that fabrication labs and makerspaces build[33].
Business & financial literacy
Make it last. The part that decides whether anything survives.
- Costing, pricing, bookkeeping and budgeting
- Marketing, sales, orders and operations
- Customer service and quality
- Hiring, paying and contracting: what a venture must understand before it can employ anyone
The academy keeps this separate from the other two. Calling all three “business” would hide the order they come in.
How it deepens across the journey
Each step depends on a prerequisite: something a learner has to understand first. Research on how people learn ideas about money is clear about what those are:
- Saving and selling can be learned very early[43].
- Understanding profit depends on first understanding how to compare prices[45].
- Abstract business ideas (ownership, the difference between revenue and profit, how an enterprise is structured) depend on ways of thinking that develop later[44].
The strongest randomised trial of hands-on enterprise education for young people found it changed mindset (persistence, creativity, planning ahead) without reliably changing business knowledge[39].
That research reports its findings by age because it studied school classes. What it actually identifies is a piece of understanding that has to come first.
So the academy checks for that understanding itself, through the placement check, rather than guessing it from a birthday. An adult who already understands price comparison moves straight past that step. Anyone who does not learns it first, whatever their age.
The wider research on enterprise education gives two more rules for designing the strand.
- Enough time matters. One-off workshops show no measurable effect, while programmes with several sessions work[40]. A randomised evaluation of a long-running youth enterprise programme found its effects mostly in attitudes and intentions, not in immediate business results[42]. That is why enterprise content is built into courses rather than run as a single afternoon.
- No one should be pushed into starting a venture. The caution at the end of this page gives the evidence.
How selling is taught: the sell loop
DreamSpace Academy teaches entrepreneurship by having a learner ask a stranger to buy something they made, and find out what the stranger says.
Selling is a cheap way to get real feedback from someone who has no reason to be kind. An unsold card is design feedback that cost an afternoon. The same loop, called the sell loop, runs at every stage: make it, price it, offer it, get turned down or paid, then change it. Only the stakes and the vocabulary go up.
| Stage | What is made and sold | What the sale teaches | Where the money goes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Explorer | Greeting cards, simple craft, at a school fair or a maker faire stall | “What is this worth?” Handling money, asking a stranger, hearing no | The learner, or a group fund the learners agree on |
| Maker | A small batch, in real materials | Cost versus price: did this make more than it cost? Simple negotiation, and why the second batch differs from the first | The maker, once the money advanced for materials is paid back |
| Innovator | A product answering a researched user problem | Finding out what customers need, a value proposition, a first real order, the cost and price of each item | The maker, or the project |
| Changemaker | Work a community depends on: a product, a service or, for those who take the venture route, a venture | Business model, pricing strategy, operations | The maker, the project or the venture |
An Explorer cannot sell greeting cards without somewhere to sell them, so the academy plans the place to sell as well: a maker faire, school fairs, and smaller programme showcases. Each needs the other. The faire gives learners at every stage a real buyer, and the sell loop gives the faire its exhibitors.
The learner sells, and the learner keeps the money. DreamSpace Academy earns nothing from it and does not count on it in any budget. Learner sales and the academy’s income must never appear in the same accounts, the same target or the same sentence in a proposal.
The moment a learner’s sales count towards the organisation’s income, the organisation has an interest in what children make and how much of it sells, and the teaching is over. How the academy itself is paid for is a separate question with a separate answer.
What a learner is entitled to
Selling is a way of teaching, and it often means children handling money in public. These protections apply every time it happens, and a facilitator cannot set them aside.
- Taking part is voluntary. A learner may decline to sell, and declining has no effect on their assessment, their progress or their standing in the group.
- The learner owns what they made and decides whether it is sold at all.
- The money is the learner’s, or goes to a group fund the learners agree on. It never reaches the organisation’s accounts.
- Family consent is explicit and informed before a minor sells anything, and it can be withdrawn.
- Materials are supplied, so that taking part never depends on what a family can afford.
- An adult is present throughout, and is responsible for handling money and for the setting.
Where this activity goes wrong
Selling with learners goes wrong in a few predictable ways.
- Never set a sales target on a learner activity. A facilitator judged on income will have children make things that sell instead of things they learn from.
- A sale to a relative proves little. Relatives buy out of kindness, which teaches the opposite lesson, so where the selling happens matters.
- Safeguarding is not optional. A child may sell only with clear, informed consent from their family, and the money goes to the child or to a group fund.
- Materials and family income. If a child must bring their own materials, the exercise sorts children by how much their family earns.
- “Nobody bought it” needs a facilitator. The failure is a lesson only if someone helps the child see it as useful information rather than rejection.
Because the sell loop runs at every stage, it produces more records of what learners earn than anything else does. Record those earnings, and label them exactly: this is small income for learners. It is not the academy’s income, and it is not evidence about livelihoods.
The article teaching enterprise by selling something sets out why each of these fails, and what it looks like when it does.
What “Earn” claims, from strongest to weakest
“Earn” is one word that covers three claims, and some are much better supported than others. The academy reports them separately rather than as a single promise.
| Tier | The claim | How strong it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Small income | A skilled maker sells things they made and earns something from it. | Near-term and low-risk. It happens at a school fair. It is not in dispute. |
| 2. A sustained livelihood | Someone earns a living from these skills, by running a venture or by earning a wage. | A hypothesis. The academy sets out to measure this claim rather than state it as fact. |
| 3. Work for others | A venture that came out of this employs, contracts or buys locally. | Found in published research, not measured here. There is no count of people employed, so this may be taught as an aim and is never reported as a result. |
Tier 2 includes wages, not only self-employment. A participant who takes a good job counts as evidence for tier 2. Defining “Earn” as self-employment only would leave most successful outcomes out of the record.
What the evidence supports
A search for evidence that makerspaces cause income, jobs or new enterprises in rural areas and in the Global South found no study that shows it. These are the closest studies, and why none of them proves it:
| Study | What it found | Why it does not prove “Earn” |
|---|---|---|
| Youth skills randomised trial, Côte d’Ivoire[55] | Large short-term employment effect | Gone by 12 to 15 months. Not about making. |
| Makerspaces and entrepreneurship[32] | More people started businesses | United States data. Not a rural or Global South setting, and income is not quantified. |
| Vocational training systematic review[56] | Effects generally small, near zero for paid employment | A warning for any claim that training leads to jobs. |
| Youth enterprise programme trial, Rwanda[41] | Unintended consequences | Points the other way: see below. |
Pushing people who would not otherwise have started a business into starting one can lower their income and their chances of a job[41]. That is why:
- the outcome field is open: learners can leave towards many different results, not down one funnel
- taking a job counts openly as success
- nobody is steered toward founding a company
How the academy works with a weak evidence base
- Present “Earn” as a theory of change, with its limits stated, never as a proven result.
- Build the measurement in. The studies above do not supply this evidence, so producing it is a useful contribution. It is part of what the academy asks funders to support: fund the work and the evidence.
- Design for lasting results, because effects fading away is the documented way these programmes fail. So the academy offers an ongoing pathway, mentoring and connections to local businesses rather than a course that simply ends.
- Lead with the academy’s own data once it exists. For this approach, in this setting, that data will be the stronger evidence.
Entrepreneurship that grows out of real opportunities and new ideas does build economies. That is not in doubt, and there is a large global body of evidence on entrepreneurial activity[37]. Sri Lanka has its own technology founders who show the pattern works from this country.
What is unproven is whether this pathway, in this setting produces the same result. That is a narrower question, and one that can be tested.