The Advanced Elective Module (AEM) for Small Business Management is a module introduced by the Centre for Innovation and Enterprise (CIE), Republic Polytechnic that seeks to equip secondary school students with the knowledge and principles of entrepreneurship.  This program exposes students to the fundamentals of a business start-up and encourages entrepreneurial learning through a real life application platform.

Recognising the value of entrepreneurship and its contribution to the long term development of the economy, one of the key thrusts of Singapore’s economic strategy is to encourage entrepreneurship and grow domestic enterprises. To this end, this programme seeks to equip students with the fundamental principles of entrepreneurship and encourage an enterprising culture by exposing youths to the experience of starting a small business. 

The programme brings students progressively through the enterprise creation process, enabling them to develop a simple business plan and execute it in a systematic, efficient and effective manner. Most importantly, the students will be able to put their knowledge into practice through the running of their own small businesses via the pushcart retail platform. This was selected as the key experiential learning platform given its manageable rent and low overheads providing the ideal learning great learning platform for students without any entrepreneurial experience.

 Beyond the experiential learning platform, key highlights of the module will include introducing students to business fundamentals such as Business Idea Generation and Evaluation, Marketing, Financing. This includes a practical session where students will engage in pushcart market analysis where they will identify the customers’ demography at different location points as well as understanding the effectiveness of different marketing and promotion strategies adopted for various businesses.

 To summarise, it is a valuable platform for secondary students to learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and gain business startup experience!

For more information, click here