Stimulation Versus Simulation: The Student Side Hustle as a Learning Innovation

A side hustle is a small-scale business activity in addition to one’s primary job. Our learning innovation is the student side hustle (SSH), a small-scale business in addition to the student’s academic work. It fits within an existing entrepreneurship course, allowing students to launch small scale ventures on a campus-based peer-to-peer marketplace platform. The SSH contributes to the broader category of side hustles and to the existing category of experiential learning exercises that result in student businesses. We position the concept in the appropriate foundational literature, and offer insights into the details of our “stimulation” and its outcomes, evidence of its effectiveness, lessons learned, and extensions of the exercise.