THE ORIGINAL DISCIPLINED ENTREPRENEURSHIP book laid out a rigorous but practical pedagogy for innovation-driven entrepreneurship. It has fundamentally changed the course of entrepreneurship education from a storytelling approach to a toolbox and systematic framework. But there is only so much that can be accomplished in a single 250-page book. This workbook builds off Disciplined Entrepreneurship to provide a way to more easily engage with the 24 Steps.

Our goal at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship is to develop high-quality entrepreneurship education and make it accessible, not just to MIT’s full-time students but also to millions of people worldwide. That is why I wrote Disciplined Entrepreneurship, taught several online courses on edX, and with my colleagues write online articles and tools to help clarify key concepts about our methodical approach to entrepreneurship.

The demand from entrepreneurs and instructors for additional materials to help them implement the 24 Steps has been simultaneously rewarding and overwhelming. There needed to be a more scalable solution, and that is the purpose of this workbook.

In this book, I provide templates and additional advice on how to implement each of the 24 Steps. You can use these templates on your own startup or as classroom deliverables to assess your students’ understanding of the topics. This workbook is not a replacement for Disciplined Entrepreneurship but rather a complement to it. It is expected that you will go back and forth between Disciplined Entrepreneurship and this workbook in order to gain a full understanding of each step.

The 24 Steps is an iterative process, so always make sure you are proactively revising your work as you go through the steps. Something that you do in Step 23 is likely to affect Step 11, or Step 9 will affect Step 5, and so on. Also, do not feel confined by these templates if you need to make some modifications to better suit the needs of the industry or specific characteristics of your startup.

The 24 Steps approach is a toolbox of the best methodologies available for entrepreneurs, and I continually evolve it and survey the landscape to take in new and/or better tools to improve the framework. You’ll see two new chapters in this workbook, one on primary market research and another on windows of opportunity and triggers. I hope that many others around the world will continue to test and contribute to the 24 Steps to make the framework even better over time. The collective wisdom of the community is better than any individual—plus many hands make for lighter and faster work.

Since the time I first published Disciplined Entrepreneurship, it has become even more clear that we need high-quality, rigorous entrepreneurship education and training sooner rather than later. The critical need for a serious body of knowledge on innovation-driven entrepreneurship has never been greater—and it will only get more so in the future. Please “lean in,” as Sheryl Sandberg would say, and help us with this cause.

Additional materials, including electronic versions of some of the worksheets herein, will be available at www.disciplinedentrepreneurship.com.