The Lawyer Next Door “Children’s Entrepreneurship School” (Attorney Hara Kazuyoshi) | Partners Law Office

1 On Sunday, August 18th, the “Children’s Entrepreneurship School” (hosted by Entre Kids, supported by the Miyoshi Town Board of Education and the Fujimi City Board of Education) was held in Fujimi City, Saitama Prefecture. It was organized by a friend of mine who is a small and medium-sized business consultant, and I participated as one of the instructors on the day.
This project was aimed at 4th to 6th grade elementary school students, and was designed to allow them to actually create a company, try their hand at business, and experience the structure of a company and trading. On the day, 17 elementary school students participated, and they were divided into 4 teams to experience business. With a break in between, it was a long project that ran from 9:45 am to 5 pm.
2. The content of the program was packed with topics such as company establishment, writing business plans, fundraising, material procurement, product development, sales promotion, sales practices, and financial results presentations, and some parts may have been a bit difficult for upper elementary school students.
As this was the first time we had planned this event, there were many things we could have done differently, but the feedback from the participating children was very positive, with comments such as “I want to come again next year,” “It was difficult, but fun,” and “I got to make friends with kids from other elementary schools,” and the event helped to blow away the fatigue we felt from supporting them all day.
3. Because the project was called “Entrepreneurship School,” I imagined that it would attract a lot of strong people who don’t want to be salaried workers and want to start and establish their own companies, but that wasn’t actually the case.
The team I was in charge of consisted of one sixth grader and three fourth graders, all male. At first, they were all quiet and quiet, perhaps because they were nervous.
After deciding on the products to sell, they proposed to appoint a president, vice president, finance officer, and advertising officer, but no one wanted to be president. In the end, they decided to assign roles by rock-paper-scissors, and A, a sixth grader who lost the most, became president.
Although the entrepreneurship school is in a sense a school for CEOs, it felt almost like adult society, and for that moment I thought that I didn’t want children to imitate this.
It seems that at school, homeroom teachers encouraged students to participate in this event and submit their workshop notes from the day, as it would count as their “summer vacation independent research project,” and there were a certain number of elementary school students and parents who signed up with the idea of ​​it being their own independent research project.
It will be a success if it allows people to experience even a little of the difficulty and joy of thinking up a business on their own.
4. Innovation will not occur unless there are many entrepreneurs who are willing to try new businesses that meet new social needs, even if they fail repeatedly. It is also important to have a support system for entrepreneurs that allows them to try again and again even after failure.
In the future, I would like to try running a “Lawyer Entrepreneurship School” for young lawyers.

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