Business Objectives in the Shark Tank

My students are usually very keen to watch a Dragon's Den / Shark Tank pitch, particularly in an afternoon lesson (but if it means less of me droning on and them avoiding doing some work then any lesson seems like a good idea to them). So I am very keen to find suitable clips that give them some occasional entertainment as well as provide for excellent discussion of some relevant point of theory. The Soy-Yer Dough pitch does just that!

Sawyer Sparks developed his gluten-free modelling dough while at university and for the first couple of years, operating out of his mother's kitchen. This has now all changed, with a manufacturing plant in his hometown of Bloomfield, Indiana. How and why this came about is told on the clip (shown below) but it boils down to an entrepreneur with objectives other than maximising profit looking for investment from the sharks who are chasing the biggest profit possible. Lots of other business theory is involved (licensing vs producing it yourself, patents, negotiation).

And I'm a big fan of using play-do on occasion (current delivery restrictions mean that I can't get my hands on any Soy-Yer Dough). Get students into groups of three or so and ask them to use play-do to create a business scene and then use it to explain ten different business concepts.