I’m excited. This is more than the usual “new semester, new students” kind of excited, though that’s always energising. This time, there’s something different.
This semester, I’m teaching Entrepreneurship with a twist: artificial intelligence as a collaborative partner in the learning journey.
If you've been following my writing, you know I'm passionate about AI in education. I've written extensively about this topic on the AIHM Higher blog.
In one previous post, I detailed how students can use AI strategically through what I call the 4Cs Framework—Collaborate, Cross-Check, Critique, and Customise. Now, I’m putting these principles into practice in our **Postgraduate Diploma** course on Entrepreneurship and Business Modelling here at the Asian Institute of Hospitality & Management (AIHM).
Entrepreneurship Meets AI
Why pair AI with entrepreneurship? Because they share the same DNA: experimentation, iteration, evidence-based decision-making, and turning uncertainty into opportunity.
Throughout this 12-week journey, my Entrepreneurship students will use AI tools not to replace their thinking, but to amplify it. They’ll explore how AI can be leveraged to test assumptions faster, generate customer insights more efficiently, and prototype business models with greater agility.
This innovative approach feels right at home at AIHM. After all, our institute was built by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs.
Built by Entrepreneurs, for Entrepreneurs
AIHM itself has entrepreneurial DNA.
We were established by Minor International, the lifestyle and hospitality giant founded by William (Bill) Heinecke, one of Asia’s most successful serial entrepreneurs. He created an empire. From Anantara and Avani hotels to NH Hotel Group, from restaurant brands to retail ventures, Mr. Heinecke embodies what it means to recognise opportunities and execute relentlessly.
In many ways, AIHM is an act of intrapreneurship—an educational innovation within the broader Minor ecosystem. We’re young, adaptive, and built to experiment.
We combine Swiss educational excellence with Asian relevance, exploring what hospitality education can look like for the next generation of business leaders. We teach experienced and aspiring hospitality professionals what it takes to be leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs.
At AIHM, our own evolution as an institute mirrors what we teach: design, test, learn, and adapt.
That’s the spirit I bring to my classroom, as well as the one I want to share with you through this series.
Your 12-Week Entrepreneurship Journey
Starting today, I’m launching a new blog series that will take you through the entire learning arc of our Postgraduate Diploma course on Entrepreneurship and Business Modelling. I’ll take you inside the classroom as we explore entrepreneurship in hospitality from the ground up.
Each post will be written immediately after I finish teaching…while the whiteboard is still full of ideas, while student questions are still echoing, and while that energy of discovery is fresh.
Think of this series as a live learning lab for hospitality professionals across Asia who want to think like entrepreneurs. Launch a new venture, or transform the one you already lead. You’ll gain critical insights for doing both. You might not have the benefit of being one of our postgrad students, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from the insights we explore. AIHM is dedicated to elevating the hospitality industry in Asia as a whole, inside and beyond our classrooms.
Whether you're a hospitality professional in Singapore thinking about launching your own concept, a hotel manager in Manila looking to innovate within your organisation, a restaurant owner in Phuket trying to differentiate in a crowded market, or simply someone fascinated by how businesses are built—this series is for you.
Understand: this course isn’t about chasing unicorns. We’re focused on practical, relevant business lessons accessible to aspiring entrepreneurs. Lessons like:
Our approach in the course and the blog series is evidence-based. We’re going to use proven tools like the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Design, and Lean Startup methodology. And yes, we're going to leverage AI as a thinking partner along the way.
The ‘Entrepreneurship’ Confusion
In my first class, I always start with a simple exercise. I ask students: "What word comes to mind when you hear 'entrepreneurship'?"
The answers are revealing. "Innovation!" "Creativity!" "Risk!" "Steve Jobs!" "Startups!" "Technology!"
These aren't wrong, exactly. But they're incomplete. They blur together concepts that we need to distinguish if we're going to think clearly about entrepreneurship.
Here's the problem: we use creativity, invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship almost interchangeably in everyday conversation. However, they're not actually same thing. Mixing up these concepts leads to confusion and poor decision-making.
Let me introduce you to what I call the C-I-I-E Framework, a way of understanding how these four concepts relate to each other and build upon one another:
| Phase | Core Question | Learning Focus | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creativity | How do we generate novel and valuable ideas? | Divergent thinking, design thinking, problem finding | A set of original concepts |
| Invention | How do we turn ideas into tangible solutions? | Technical development, prototyping, proof of concept | A working prototype or technical solution |
| Innovation | How do we transform ideas into something useful that provides value? | Experimentation, prototyping, validation | A viable product, service, or process |
| Entrepreneurship | How do we capture and deliver value sustainably? | Opportunity recognition, business modeling, market testing | A business model and venture pitch |
Notice the progression:
These four actions don’t always go hand-in-hand. You can be creative without being entrepreneurial. You can invent something without innovating. You can innovate without building a business. Each phase requires different skills, different mindsets, different tools.
When students see this distinction, a switch flips. They realise why a “great idea” isn’t enough. They come to understand that entrepreneurship doesn’t thrive on inspiration alone. It comes to life with disciplined execution.
Technical brilliance is important, but it doesn’t automatically translate to business success. In this course, students learn that entrepreneurship is less about the eureka moment and more about the hard work of validation, iteration, and business model design.
The Myth of the Startup—and the Reality of Hospitality Entrepreneurship
When most people hear “entrepreneurship,” they picture Silicon Valley: founders, venture capital, disruption. But entrepreneurship in hospitality looks—and feels—different.
If we only study the tech startup playbook, we miss what actually matters for creating successful hospitality ventures. Entrepreneurship in hospitality centres on creating sustainable value through experiences, empathy and execution.
A few examples:
Each is an entrepreneur—some inside companies, others on their own.
You don’t need to invent new technology. You need to identify opportunities, validate them, and build models that deliver value to both guests and your business.
Your opportunity might take the form of opening an independent restaurant or hotel, taking an existing franchise into a new market, creating a new service delivery model, reimagining guest experiences with a new boutique concept, or innovating within an existing organisation (intrapreneurship).
Three Lenses for Spotting Hospitality Opportunities
So how do you actually identify entrepreneurial opportunities in hospitality? In our course, I teach students to look through three distinct lenses:
1. Guest Experience LensAsk yourself: How can we create or improve memorable experiences for guests?
This might mean designing a boutique hotel concept that offers hyper-personalised service, or creating a restaurant experience that tells a compelling story through food and atmosphere. The opportunity lies in delivering experiences that existing providers aren't offering, or aren't offering well.
2. Service Gap LensAsk yourself: What unmet needs exist in the market? Where are customers frustrated? What jobs do they need done that current services don't address?
Food delivery apps emerged from this lens. They recognised that customers wanted restaurant food at home, but restaurants weren't equipped to deliver it efficiently.
3. Business Model LensAsk yourself: Are there new ways to deliver and capture value?
Airbnb didn't invent hospitality or lodging. They invented a new business model that connected property owners with guests in a way that created value for both sides. Sometimes the innovation isn't in what you offer, but in how you deliver it and how you make money from it.
We map these three lenses map onto the Entrepreneurial Thought & Action framework developed by Marc Rice and colleagues at Babson College. Applying the framework, we create success by aligning:
Beyond having a ‘brilliant idea’, entrepreneurship is about recognising where these various elements can come together in a way that creates and captures value. This framework will guide us throughout the entire 12-week journey.
Intrapreneurship: Entrepreneurship from the Inside
For many professionals, entrepreneurship begins within their current organisation.
As Harvard Business Review explains, intrapreneurs are individuals who innovate from inside organisations—launching new ideas, redesigning services, or improving processes that make their companies better.
This is where many of my students begin. They test new guest-experience pilots, propose revenue ideas to management, or create small efficiency improvements that later scale. These “micro-ventures” often lead to promotions and new leadership opportunities.
AI as a Thinking Partner
Throughout the course, the entrepreneurial students will leverage tools like ChatGPT and Claude to assist with market research, customer persona development, competitive analysis, and business model iteration. But—and this is critical—they'll be doing so strategically, using the 4 Cs framework we’ve mentioned:
To be clear: letting AI do all the work…doesn’t work.
Our approach is about using AI to work smarter, test faster, and think more deeply. AI supports agility. The key to using AI effectively is human interpretation, using it with the insight, empathy, and context only people bring.
During this academic term, our Entrepreneurship and Business Modelling students are learning how to strike this balance to super-charge their entrepreneurial activities in the hospitality sector.
What’s Coming Next
Over the next three months, I'll take you through the complete entrepreneurial journey as I teach it to my students. Here's what we'll explore together:
Weeks 1-4: Discovery
Weeks 5-8: Design and Testing
Weeks 9-12: Refinement and Pitch
Each week, I’ll share what’s working, what surprises us, and what lessons emerge. We’ll deep-dive into both global frameworks and the local realities of Asia’s hospitality scene.
Your Invitation to Join the Journey
Whether you're considering enrolling in our Postgraduate Diploma programme, you're a hospitality professional looking to think more entrepreneurially, or you're simply curious about how ventures are built in our industry, I invite you to follow along.
Each week, I'll share what we're learning in the classroom: the frameworks, the business insights, the surprising moments, the questions that make us think differently. I'll bring you real examples from hospitality entrepreneurs across Asia and beyond. In these posts, I'll share tools you can use immediately in your own work.
Follow the complete 12-week series on the AIHM Higher Blog, connect with me on LinkedIn, and explore how AIHM’s Postgraduate Diploma in International Hospitality Management can help you shape the next generation of hospitality innovation across Asia.
References & Resources
Next in the Series
Opportunity Recognition & Ideation: How to Spot What Others Miss – where we'll explore the analog advantage, creativity techniques, and the discipline of seeing opportunities in everyday experiences.