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There’s a moment in every classroom when confidence meets reality — when students move from nodding along to actually explaining what they’ve learned. And in Week 3 of our PGD Entrepreneurship & Business Modelling course, that moment became the catalyst for some of the deepest learning yet.
Read on to see how understanding turns into mastery.
There’s a moment every teacher recognises: a student nods confidently during your explanation, takes notes, maybe even asks a clarifying question. They understand the Business Model Canvas (or whatever the topic at hand is). They’ve got it.
Then you ask them to explain it to someone else.
That’s when the real learning begins.
The Illusion of ‘I’ve Got This’
Students arrived feeling reasonably confident. They had multiple class sessions behind them; they’d mapped business models; they’d explored ideation; they’d learned prompting basics and used AI tools successfully.
These postgraduate hospitality students are smart and motivated, and many of them are already working in hotels or related services industries—ideal profiles for the PGD’s management progression pathway.
Then they had to explain their thinking.
The cracks appeared. This week’s class revealed something very important: understanding becomes real only when it’s spoken, defended, translated to real-world contexts, or validated. This insight framed everything that followed.
Speed Dating with Business Models
We opened this week’s Entrepreneurship class with an exercise I call BMC Speed Dating. It was an activity that took a full hour but proved worth every minute. The concept is simple: students pair up and take turns explaining different blocks of the Business Model Canvas. Person A has one minute to explain a block: "What is this? Why does it matter?" Then Person B asks for a real-world example. They then switch roles and move to a different block.
The pedagogical principle here is straightforward: verbal explanation forces deeper understanding. Reading about the "Customer Relationships" block is one thing. Articulating why it matters to a peer who’s asking "Why did you choose that? What assumption are you making?" is another thing entirely.
What struck me during this exercise was watching students struggle not with the concepts themselves, but with translating their understanding into clear explanations. They knew what "Key Activities" meant in theory, but explaining why those activities matter for a specific business model required them to think at a different level.
One hour of peer teaching accomplished what two hours of lecture never could. Students left the exercise not just knowing the BMC blocks, but owning them. This breakthrough became the foundation for the rest of the session.
One hour of peer teaching accomplished what two hours of lecture never could. Students left the exercise not just knowing the BMC blocks, but owning them. This mastery mirrors the real-world communication skills expected of future hospitality managers and postgraduate diploma candidates.
This breakthrough became the foundation for the rest of the session.
By this point, I thought we were past basic AI prompting issues. We’d covered prompting techniques in Session 2. Students had practiced. They’d seen examples.
In this Entrepreneurship & Business Modelling course, we’re addressing how AI tools have radically changed the way innovative professionals do business. And AI prompting is key; it’s become a fundamental competency for nearly all industries, including hospitality environments. Hospitality managers and entrepreneurs increasingly rely on AI tools for market research, forecasting, and customer insight.
We moved into this week’s AI research exercise. I demonstrated research capabilities across multiple platforms: ChatGPT’s deep research, Claude’s analysis features, Perplexity’s source-backed answers, Gemini’s research tools (which students discovered they have Pro access to through their university accounts). The task I gave was fairly simple: validate the jobs-to-be-done they’d identified in previous sessions using AI research tools.
The PGD students worked in pairs. Nearly all of them struggled with crafting prompts that would yield valuable insights rather than generic summaries.
This recurring struggle tells me something important: AI prompting isn’t a competence you master in one lesson. It’s iterative, contextual, and requires practice across different use cases. Students can follow a prompting formula when shown, but applying those principles independently—especially when the goal is research validation rather than content generation—requires more practice than I initially anticipated.
Developing strong AI prompting skills is now part of the core management toolkit in hospitality, especially as hotels adopt AI for guest analytics, service personalisation, and operational decision-making. AI literacy has emerged as an essential competency in modern hospitality management and an increasingly important expectation for anyone pursuing international hospitality careers.
The good news? Students are building this skill progressively. Each session’s AI exercises add another layer of competence. By the time they reach Phase 2 of the course (customer discovery interviews), they’ll need these research skills to analyse markets and validate assumptions. We’re building the foundation now.
Why Pizza Hut Won (It Wasn’t the Cheese)
As we saw with our activities on the Business Model Canvas and AI prompting, understanding a topic conceptually is one thing. Seeing how it will play out in a real-world business scenario is another. The AI research task revolved around the Jobs to Be Done Framework. To reinforce how this framework works, we shifted into a case study close to home.
Students worked through an excerpt from William Heinecke’s book The Entrepreneur. As AIHM’s founder and Minor International’s chairman, his entrepreneurial journey offers authentic case studies that resonate with students in ways generic examples never could.
These real-world connections are central to the PGD programme. Students gain access to a high-value industry network—Minor Hotels and our broader ecosystem—that strengthens both learning and career pathways. They learn from executives and entrepreneurs through localised case studies and ample networking opportunities.
In The Entrepreneur, Heinecke described the late 1970s decision to introduce Pizza Hut despite conventional wisdom that “Thais don’t like cheese.” Our students analysed eight questions designed to unpack the different layers of jobs customers were trying to get done.
The functional job was straightforward: “Give me a reliable place to enjoy Western-style food.”
But the emotional and social jobs revealed what actually drove Pizza Hut’s success in Thailand. Emotionally, customers wanted to “experience something modern and exciting.” Socially, they wanted to “belong to a modern, global, middle-class lifestyle.”
This distinction matters immensely for entrepreneurs. If you think Pizza Hut succeeded in Thailand simply because it served good pizza, you’ve missed the deeper insight about what customers were actually hiring the product to do. Young Thais in the 1970s and 80s with increasing purchasing power and changing aspirations weren’t just buying food; they were buying identity and status.
The image below captures this important insight. Of course, it’s a play on René Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe with the caption, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe.”) That image has essentially become a meme today. While Magritte was making a kind of intellectual joke—the illustration is not an actual pipe but a picture of one—our lesson was more down-to-earth and practical.
A pizza isn’t just a pizza. It’s so much more. It’s the job it does for the customer.
With the “slice of insight” about pizza fresh in our minds, it was time to reframe markets.
Traditional market definitions focus on products. For example: "the Bangkok boutique hotel market" defined by counting hotels and rooms. This product-based thinking artificially limits your understanding of competition and opportunity.
Instead, I introduced a jobs-based definition:
Market = People + Job
A market isn’t a product category. It’s a group of people trying to get a specific job done. “Young professionals trying to experience authentic local culture while traveling in Bangkok” is a market definition that reveals both competition (hostels, Airbnb, local guesthouses, boutique hotels) AND what customers actually care about (authentic experiences, not just room features).
This simplified framework deliberately excludes TAM/SAM/SOM calculations. Students don’t need complex market-sizing formulas in Phase 1. They need to identify who their customers are and what jobs those customers are trying to accomplish. The validation work comes later.
This kind of customer-centred market framing is foundational in hospitality management programmes worldwide, including master’s-level study at schools like Les Roches.
Students realised how product-centric thinking had been quietly limiting their ideas.
The Value Proposition Canvas: Start with the Customer
Only after redefining markets could we move into the Value Proposition Canvas (VPC). For today’s class, we focused on the right side of the Canvas, the side focused on customer segments.
Short-stay business travellers in Bangkok (late 20s–40s)
Students identified “jobs to be done”, followed by brainstorming consumer pains and gains that could be created in a product:
Jobs to Be Done:
- Quick, smooth check-in/out (functional)
- Restful sleep (functional)
- Maintaining health routines (functional)
- Reducing stress before meetings (emotional)
- Unhealthy food options
- Rooms without a proper workspace
- Poor focus before presentations
- Gym hours misaligned with schedules
- Fast, stable Wi-Fi
- Clean, quiet rooms
- Minimal commute
- Value for money
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This exercise mirrors the kind of business-modelling work students will be expected to perform if they progress to a master’s degree in Europe via the PGD’s Les Roches pathway.
Students began to see how easily entrepreneurs design the *wrong* offerings when the customer profile is superficial. You can build a rooftop bar your customer doesn’t need…and miss the 6 a.m. gym access they do.
This was the week students realised:
Value starts with customers, rather than with your idea.
Features Tell, Benefits Sell
Before our entrepreneurial thinkers can really get to work on the left side of the Value Proposition Canvas (products, pain relievers, gain creators), they need to understand what “value” actually means.
The fundamental principle we covered:
Customers don’t care about your product. They care about the benefits your product delivers.
Products have features. Customers want benefits.
Once students understood their segment, we shifted to the Feature–Advantage–Benefit (FAB) framework. We walked through the framework using a simple example: a knife. Made of stainless steel (feature), it won’t corrode (advantage) which allows customers to save money by not replacing it annually (benefit). A hand-forged high-carbon steel blade (feature) keeps its edge longer (advantage) which saves time on sharpening and makes cutting easier (benefit).
We then applied FAB to luxury hotel features, seeing them through to their related advantages and benefits:
- High-thread-count sheets → Comfortable sleep → Wake feeling refreshed and ready for the day
- 24-hour concierge → Personalised assistance anytime → Relax without worrying about logistics
- Michelin-starred restaurant → World-class dining on-site → Feel proud of refined taste and belonging to exclusive group.
If you can’t express a feature in terms of a meaningful benefit, the feature isn’t creating value. It’s noise.
This understanding of value creation led into the critical value equation.
In the Value Proposition Canvas, these “benefits” show up in two forms: pain relievers and gain creators. Pain relievers address what your customer wants to avoid: stress, delays, confusion, wasted time, poor sleep…for example. Gain creators support what they want to achieve: efficiency, comfort, confidence, pride, a sense of belonging, etc.
These two boxes on the left side of the Canvas are simply structured ways of expressing benefits. They help entrepreneurs translate customer insights into specific offerings that either reduce friction or add meaningful value.
The Equation Behind Every Customer Decision
Value isn’t inherent in your product. It exists in the customer’s perception of whether your benefits outweigh their costs.
Customers constantly evaluate:
Benefits vs. Costs ( Money + Time + Effort )
A traveller with a packed schedule values time more than price.
A family on holiday values peace-of-mind and convenience.
A business traveler values reliability above ambience.
When benefits exceed costs, customers perceive value and make a purchase. When costs exceed benefits, they don’t. This is almost like quick, subconscious calculus customers constantly perform in their head. Your potential customers are judging you. All the time.
Understanding the value equation helps you focus your value proposition on what actually moves the needle for your target customers. This is a core decision-making skill for future hospitality entrepreneurs and hotel managers. As PGD graduates enter leadership-track roles where they’ll be “intrapreneurs” inside a company or even launch their own businesses, their deep understanding of the value equation (and how to act on it) will be a major asset.
Next Week: From Customer Truths to Product Ideas
Next week, students move to the left side of the Value Proposition Canvas. They’ll begin shaping products, services, pain relievers, and gain creators that align directly with the customer insights they’ve gathered.
Week 4 made one idea unmistakably clear:
Entrepreneurship begins with understanding what customers genuinely care about and designing value with intention.
Once that mindset clicks, the entire quest shifts. Frameworks make more sense. Ideas sharpen. Decisions become grounded. And a simple slice of pizza becomes a reminder that every offering has a deeper job to do—one that great entrepreneurs learn to see, design for, and deliver.
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Further Reading & Resources
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Curious about the PGD in International Hospitality Management?
The Postgraduate Diploma in International Hospitality Management at AIHM is an advanced, one-year programme with a curriculum designed in academic association with Les Roches, one of the world’s top-ranked hospitality management schools.
The PGD builds the management and leadership skills needed for global hospitality careers. Graduates can progress to Les Roches and earn a Master’s degree with just one additional semester of study in Switzerland or Spain.
Find out more about the PGD.
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