SBIR Phase I: Crowd Sourcing Apprenticeship Learning: A Web Platform for Teaching Entrepreneurial Lawyering

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目是创建一个基于网络的平台，通过虚拟学徒来教授创业律师技能。企业家的技能和经验？S律师对企业家的成功有着重要的影响。律师是将创新转化为商业化的关键建筑师。它们组织实体，安排融资，保护知识产权，并充当创业社区的节点。有能力很好地履行这些职能的律师太少了。法学院和律师事务所都没有提供有效的创业律师技能培训。因此，社会未能充分利用技术创新的潜力。该项目是对现有教育模式的颠覆性创新，通过将高级从业者重新引入新手教育，将重心转移到课堂之外。它的本质是？众包？专家参与。通过分配指导工作，该平台增加了以前依赖于不可扩展的面对面交互的更高级别学徒学习的机会。此项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是创建一种低成本的杠杆手段，以提高实践准备？应届法律系毕业生的创业律师技能。法学院推出了各种体验式学习计划，包括临床课程和模拟。律师事务所也尝试了类似的培训计划。虽然在边际上改善了学习，但这些努力都没有产生根本性的影响。它们的核心都依赖于传统的、成本高昂的师生互动模式。各种在线工具提供了获取实质性知识的资源，但缺乏导致发展构成真正专门知识的认知能力的互动部分。没有一种解决方案试图利用资深从业者群体中的专业知识。使用社交网络和分布式工作策略来克服他们参与的障碍，这个项目利用了老年人分享他们专业知识的愿望。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is the creation of a web-based platform for teaching entrepreneurial lawyering skills through virtual apprenticeships. The skill and experience of an entrepreneur?s lawyer have a significant impact on the success of the entrepreneur. Lawyers are critical architects of bringing innovation to commercialization. They organize entities, structure financings, protect intellectual property and serve as the nodes of entrepreneurial communities. Too few lawyers have the skills to perform these functions well. Neither law schools nor law firms offer effective training in entrepreneurial lawyering skills. As a result, society fails to capitalize on the full potential of technological innovation. The project is a disruptive innovation to the existing educational model that shifts its center of gravity outside of the classroom by reintroducing senior practitioners into the education of novices. Its essence is ?crowd sourcing? expert participation. By distributing the work of mentoring, the platform multiplies the opportunities for higher order apprenticeship learning that previously depended on non-scalable, face-to-face interactions.The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to create a low cost, leveraged means to improve the ?practice readiness? of recent law graduates in entrepreneurial lawyering skills. Law schools have launched various experiential learning initiatives, including clinical offerings and simulations. Law firms have experimented with similar training programs. While improving learning on the margin, none of these efforts has had a fundamental impact. All rely at their core on the traditional, high-cost model of student-teacher interaction. Various on-line tools offer resources for acquiring substantive knowledge but lack the interactive component that leads to the development of the cognitive capacities that make up true expertise. None of the solutions has attempted to tap the reservoir of expertise found among the community of senior practitioners. Using social networking and distributed work strategies to overcome the obstacles to their participation, this project capitalizes on the desire of seniors to share their expertise.