Instructor Resource
Neck, Entrepreneurship, 1e
SAGE Publishing, 2018
Answers to Questions in the Text
Chapter 7: Testing & Experimenting in Markets
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN ACTION
Mark Wallace, Pete Endres, and Jason Epstein, Co-Founders, Parlor Skis
1. Identify some ways in which the Parlor Skis founders’ collective experience helped them
to start their own business.
2. In what ways do you think testing and experimentation helped the Parlor Skis
entrepreneurs to grow their business?
Sample Answer: An impressive amount of testing and experimentation (four years of it before
3. Suppose you started a business and your original assumptions about your target
customer base turned out to be incorrect? How would you deal with this setback?
RESEARCH AT WORK
1. How would you describe Dholakia and Durham’s hypothesis?
Sample Answer: While it does not explicitly identify their initial hypothesis in the text, it is
2. Do you think the two experimenters used the most effective approach to test their
hypothesis? Why or why not?
Instructor Resource
Neck, Entrepreneurship, 1e
SAGE Publishing, 2018
Sample answer: Answers may vary from student to student. While it is evident that their
3. Choose a particular kind of business that you imagine you are starting. How would you
use social media to test a reaction of your target audience?
ENTREPRENEURSHIP MEETS ETHICS
The Rights of Research Participants
1. How would you go about finding out what kinds of testing are required for an
entrepreneurial product or service?
2. If your product or service was suitable for nonprofessional testing in people’s homes or
at a focus group, who would you recruit to participate in your test? Explain how you
would choose your best customer types to participate.
3. How would you ensure that the participants in your experiments are treated ethically
and their rights are protected?
Sample Answer: Do your due diligence by studying the subject of ethical research practices.
Instructor Resource
Neck, Entrepreneurship, 1e
SAGE Publishing, 2018
MINDSHIFT
CREATE A STORYBOARD AND ONE SIMPLE EXPERIMENT
1. At the outset of this exercise, how did you feel about being asked to create a
storyboard? Do you think people with artistic training or talent have an advantage in
storyboarding? Why or why not?
Sample Answer: Answers may vary from student to student. As for artistic training or talent
2. Is your list of questions longer or shorter than you expected? How easy or difficult was it
to translate your top three questions into experiments?
3. What did you learn from this exercise that surprised you?
Summary Questions
1. Define experiments and describe the steps of experimentation.
Experiments are mechanisms to test the validity of a hypothesis. The starting point of an
2. Identify and describe the six steps of scientific experimentation
Instructor Resource
Neck, Entrepreneurship, 1e
SAGE Publishing, 2018
3. Demonstrate how to test hypotheses and identify customers.
It is critical that when testing hypotheses, entrepreneurs need not actually develop elaborate,
4. Explore different ways of generating data and describe the rules of experimentation.
When experimenting, entrepreneurs should build upon learning, including recently acquired
5. Identify three types of experiments most commonly used.
6. Illustrate the power of storyboarding as a form of prototyping and a basis for experiments.
Engaging, simple, and effective in communicating a point or position, storyboards exemplify the