1. Business Principles shared by Steve Mariotti
Now that I've had some time to reflect on this journey, I can see what worked and what failed to spread
this idea. Here are the principles that have worked for me.
Twelve Tenets for Replicating an Idea
1. Recognize Your Idea as an Agent of Change
Visualize how you want the world to be and imagine your idea as an agent of change. Keep the core
idea to one sentence -- and then outline the big picture in full detail. Use visuals, define strategy, and
encourage discussion: Ask others to envision your goals. This process will define the integrity of your
idea, and ensure that it is the driving force behind everything you do.
Look for new ideas at the intersection of two seemingly disparate situations that, when overlapped,
create a harmonious solution. In my case, those two separate situations were 1) small business training
and 2) teaching low income youth. When I began teaching public high school in 1982, these two
concepts had yet to be combined. Traditionally, most schools globally are not conducive to
entrepreneurial culture. School curriculum is often based on memory recall and isolated problem
solving. It tends to lack an overarching framework that connects reading and math to the workplace
environment.
As a result, my students were often not motivated to learn. When I began teaching them practical
business lessons, however, they became very engaged. I discovered that students actively want to apply
what they learn in the classroom to the outside world in a real, tangible way -- not in preparation for
what may arise, but in the here and now. I built my career on this insight. Combining core curriculum
with teaching entrepreneurship became a self-sustaining concept, and the mission of providing
entrepreneurship programs to inspire young people from low-income communities to stay in school
and plan for successful futures encapsulated my vision: Every child can learn to create a pathway to
prosperity.
2. Define Your Mission and Your Strategy
Your mission is to move the world closer to your vision. Write a mission statement that will distinguish
your mission from others and yet allow for creative growth. Defining your mission is essential because
it conveys what you do and provides the framework for your actions. It is the context in which current
activities are evaluated and from which strategies will be formulated. NFTE holds the value of my
initial idea in its mission statement: NFTE provides a highly experiential and academic program that
inspires young people from low income communities to recognize opportunity and plan for successful
futures by pursuing educational opportunities and starting their own businesses.
Your strategy, how you are going to compete, is comprised of the creative tactics you use to accomplish
your mission personified by how you utilize your resources. NFTE integrates entrepreneurship classes
within school curricula and structures after-school programs, with the goal of teaching business
literacy to low-income youth. The three main areas of services are: entrepreneurship and business
literacy curriculum; teacher training and certification to implement NFTE programs; and alumni
services to provide a network of support for program graduates. This last allows us to evaluate our
long-term impact. Every service we offer replicates our initial, core idea: Every child deserves to learn
economic self-sustainability.
3. Marshal Your Resources for Greater Impact.
Your primary role as change agent will be to marshal resources and to allocate them successfully. Put
together a package of resources -- facilities, labor, capital sources, branding potential -- to support
your idea and the organization you will be forming to accommodate it. You will be creating a support

2. system for your idea that will enable you to generate awareness of your mission and provide for future
growth.
Your legal structure (for-profit or non-profit) will be part of your strategy for gathering resources.
Choose carefully, as each has its pros and cons. Work through multiple legal structures and have your
idea integrated into other legal structures to get maximum impact and leverage. By infusing your idea
into other structures you will be using other organizations' fixed costs as a vehicle to replicate and
advance your idea. And remember, you can replicate an idea without a legal structure simply by
publishing and speaking to audiences about it. That was Planck's methodology.
4. Protect the Integrity of Your Idea: Brand It.
Document, copyright, patent and trademark, and be prepared to use the legal system of intellectual
property rights as defined in various countries, to solidify your idea into being. You may not own the
idea, but you own the expression of it, and this is what you will need to protect.
Choosing the right name for your organization is vital. It should make a great first impression and be
easily remembered. Include a tagline that emphasizes what you do. Initially, my organization's name
was the South Bronx Entrepreneurial Education Project, but I soon realized that this would not do for
a national movement, so I changed it to the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship
(NFTE). As we began to develop international partnerships, we changed the name again, to the
Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (which kept the initials NFTE), with the tagline, Start It Up.
We also decided that NFTE should be pronounced as an acronym, "Nifty," to create an easily
remembered nickname. Your name and tagline may change, but getting them right initially can have a
significant bearing on your future.
Once you have defined your idea in a mission statement and named the organization that will carry
your idea into the world, develop a program manual. Write it with scalable impact in mind. Describe
your business, where you are located, the products and services you are providing and standards of
quality. Include past marketing and sales, and projected goals.
In NFTE's case, our first replication overseas lasted only three years. We chose a partner that had
similar goals but did not have the capital to sustain the effort. We realized that without capital you
cannot get things done, and we severed the relationship. Fortunately, our agreement included a clause
that outlined what would happen if the relationship did not work out. Because we were careful to
protect the integrity of our idea and brand it, from the start, we were able to keep all intellectual
property, including our name and logo, and begin again.
5. Know Your Story and Tell It Effectively.
Every idea worth replicating has a powerful story behind it. How you introduce the motivation behind
your idea will become as important as the idea itself. The story of how your organization came into
existence is the frame for how you illustrate the changes it will accomplish. The story should be the
driving force in your communications.
Being mugged by economically disadvantaged young men was my impetus. As a result of this
experience, I sought to better the lives of at-risk youth and guide them to a pathway of economic self-
sustainability. The idea resulted from a transformative change: After the mugging I suffered from
PTSD. To overcome it, I decided to confront my fear of urban youth by becoming a New York City
public high school teacher. I quickly lost my fear of these young people became part of the local
community and became filled with a desire to teach them entrepreneurship and an ownership mind
frame, so that none of them would ever have to resort to crime.

3. A story is compelling when it is true, told with passion and energy in a concise and easy-to-understand
way, and centrally focused on human behavior. Others will need to know how your idea can help
people live better lives, and why you are the person to execute it. Being able to communicate your idea
to others through the media will be absolutely essential -- the most successful way to do this will be
through a motivational story. Developing a concise "elevator pitch," so you can share your idea across
quickly and succinctly is also important.
6. Your Unit of Change: the Numbers that Will Drive You.
For your idea to be replicated throughout the world, its effects must be measurable. Find the "unit of
change" for your idea -- the unit you will use to measure the effectiveness of your idea. From day one,
my unit of change was the cost of the NFTE program for one child versus the loss in productivity if that
child were to drop out of school.
Once you have defined your unit of change, you can perform cost/benefit analysis and use it to create a
powerful public awareness message: This is the impact your idea is having. Describing the impact in
economic terms will help you measure success, and drive your future funding efforts.
At present, the NFTE program cost-per-student is under $1000 annually, and the benefit of keeping a
child in school and successfully equipping him or her for the workforce is over a million dollars -- the
estimated loss in lifetime wages for a high school dropout (per the Alliance of Excellent Education).
The escalating rate of high school dropouts causes an alarming total loss of $325 billion in wages in the
U.S. alone.
Knowing your unit of change lets you translate the worth of your idea to others. For NFTE graduates,
street smarts become business smarts and their economic impact on the world is in the billions of
dollars. You and your team should know and internalize the numbers that drive performance, and the
financial implications of each choice made along the way.
Establish how you measure success, and use your measurements to promote the organization through
public-relations efforts. Measuring success from the start will also incentivize your employees to
further your mission, providing them with a simple and effective way to measure their impact.
7. Partnering for Leverage -- the Key to Creating a Movement.
Begin to partner right away, but select your partners carefully. Look for other organizations that can
effectively implement your idea in combination with their own efforts -- making sure, of course, that
your missions align. This will enable you to use their resources to leverage activity around your own
mission. As you gain momentum and replicate, you may partner with many organizations. Always seek
those that have complementary features to your own.
After we clearly defined our vision and our service capabilities at NFTE, we realized that instead of
creating affiliate programs and partnering with individual teachers, we would have a stronger impact
by centralize our resources and aligning with public school systems, and established organizations
such as the Boys & Girls Clubs. Overseas, we looked for wealthy individuals or educational entities
willing to take responsibility for a NFTE program. One of our first successful replications came from
partnering with the Harvard Business School Clubs to establish NFTE programs in the Netherlands
and Belgium.
When evaluating potential partners, consider the following:
Geography

4. If your replication strategy involves hiring employees in different locations, break the target areas into
geographical units. This could be by country, language or ethnicity. Each unit will need an individual
strategy.
Non-exclusive vs. Exclusive
Make sure you understand what rights you are granting when you franchise or license. Exclusive rights
have to be carefully defined. If you have an agreement with a publisher, for example, make sure it does
not hinder international sales in certain countries.
Media Messaging
This may be the most important consideration of all. Do not underestimate how much harm can be
done to the replication of your idea by inconsistent messaging. The telling of the idea's story to the
media must be consistent, and you need to make sure you have the final authority over media
messages.
Time Limit
Every relationship will have a time limit, and it should be spelled out. This will provide for a natural
and non-contentious conclusion to an arrangement. It also encourages a regular review of the
relationship. How to get out of the relationship before the time limit expires, if necessary, should also
be considered.
Financial Arrangement
Get the incentives right. Think through how all parties will benefit. Ultimately, everyone should be
incentivized monetarily, as well as philanthropically, in the replication process.
Fundraising Issues
Who will control the right to fundraise for the idea? This is a key issue that must be discussed. Be
careful about giving away this right permanently. Over the long-term, whoever controls the money will
control the idea.
Reporting and Verifying Program Research Requirements
This is also key; as how the results are measured in each geographical area will be all-important
decisions.
Choosing the Replication Strategy
In NFTE's case, we decided to focus on three things: curriculum development, teacher training, and
alumni services. Choosing this strategy enabled enable us to become the world leader in youth
entrepreneurship in these three areas. Just as importantly, it allowed us to clearly explain to others in
our field what we were replicating.
Wherever you partner, be sensitive to culture. Make sure your idea is culturally friendly. Learn
everything you can about the culture of the communities in which you are going to replicate. Learn
about the people, and study their institutions and unwritten rules. Make sure your idea fits into their
ethos.
Remember, quality and consistency are the toughest issues for idea replication. A particular program
might work well at a particular place and time but, when replicated, the outcome is so different that
the name and brand, or the idea itself, can be damaged, perhaps permanently. Do not replicate until
quality controls are in place.
8. Always Keep Researching.

5. Spend half your funds on research. Explain to donors and supporters that research and programming
budgets must be kept separate, and the former cannot be included in your "economics of one unit," as
your variable costs will appear much to high.
Use three types of research:
 Your own observations, recorded in a journal
 Videotaping of activities, interviews, etc.
 Standardized testing to measure your progress and record your achievements (always include
pre- and post-tests as part of the procedure). Whenever possible use a "random assignment"
method or control groups, for without such comparison, it is almost impossible to gain insights
or to demonstrate that your idea is working.
In my opinion, video documentation of your unit of change before and after a program is the best
research of all. I produced a video of my students running a school store in 1986, for example, that
compared their interviews before they completed the NFTE program and afterwards. I used it to raise
over $200,000.
9. Think Long Term.
You must think of the future from day one. Forecast in terms of decades, beyond your own lifetime --
that is how long it will probably take for you idea to affect the world.
For an idea to be successful, it needs to grow, and you will have to decide where and how to plant it,
nurture it, and replicate it over time.
If your idea becomes successful, it will take on a life of its own. To last and survive, an idea must be
simple and seem inevitable. There truly is no force like an idea whose time has come.
10. Always Be in "Pilot" Mode.
In order to grow an organization, you must have the flexibility to embrace change. NFTE has evolved
over its 25 years as I have integrated my own lessons learned along the way. We continually seek to
enhance our message, to evaluate the processes by which we measure success and calculate our
impact, and to embrace our strengths and improve our weaknesses. What did not change, however,
was the core idea that every child everywhere should find a pathway to prosperity, and the vision that
this idea can be integrated into educational systems and programs around the world.
If you stay in pilot mode, you can use failure and criticism as the building blocks for future growth.
When things inevitably go wrong, you will learn to view this as a part of the building process.
11. Join Organizations Where You Can Meet People with the Resources You Need.
The World Economic Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations are examples of organizations that
have highly influential members, If your idea has international implications, convincing them of the
value of your ideas will help to greatly in the replication of your idea. Other useful organizations
include the Aspen Institute, think tanks, and trade organizations that work in the area you are trying to
influence. Write articles for their publications and communicate with their membership.
12. Allow Your Idea To Expand Beyond Yourself
Your ultimate goal is for your idea to become a natural part of how people think about the world. This
means that one day very few people will know that it originally was yours. A simple idea will grow
organically through the implementation and experience others bring to it. Allow for open dialogue and
the possibility for others to get involved.

6. A successful replication will get your idea into the minds of others, where it can actualize, affect the
world at large, and become an agent of change. If an idea has value, replicating it will be the best way
to help others and change the world.