Inquiry-Based Learning and Entrepreneurship Education Share the Same Backbone: Learning That Starts with "What Do You Want to Do?"

This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.

Inquiry-based learning and entrepreneurship education carry different names and come from different institutional roots, yet the backbone of the learning is almost identical. Japan's Courses of Study for high schools embed in the goals of the Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study a process of "finding a question from the relationship between real society, real life, and the self, and setting your own task." Meanwhile Yoichi Ito, dean of Musashino University's Faculty of Entrepreneurship, says the essence of entrepreneurship education comes down to one question: "What do you want to do?" In both cases, the starting point is a question that lives inside the student. In this article, I place the original text of the Courses of Study alongside Ito's public statements to confirm the shared structure, then distill it into questioning and reflection routines that high school teachers can use in tomorrow's inquiry class. Everything here rests on primary sources.

Three key points first.

• The goals of the Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study include the phrase "cultivate the attitude of creating new value and seeking to realize a better society," and Yoichi Ito defines entrepreneurship as "the mindset of stepping forward without fear of failure, grounded in high aspiration and ethics, to create new value." The two are built from almost the same words.
• MEXT itself defines entrepreneurship education as "education that builds the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes to take on challenges toward solving problems and to explore solutions in collaboration with others" — so even at the level of official language, the two already overlap.
• The intersection lies in how questions are posed and how reflection is designed. Centered on "What do you want to do?", I introduce routines for theme-setting, one-on-one talks, and reflection, scene by scene.

Two kinds of education, taught in separate classrooms

The Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study was born in the 2018 revision of the Courses of Study, renamed from the former "Period for Integrated Study," and rolled out year by year starting with students who entered high school in the 2022 academic year. Its standard credit load is three to six credits, and every high school student takes it — a thick pillar of the curriculum¹². Entrepreneurship education, on the other hand, spread on the momentum of the government's Startup Development Five-Year Plan decided in November 2022. From FY2023, MEXT has been running its core program, the EDGE-PRIME Initiative, extending the target audience from elementary schoolers through high school and technical college students³.

As institutions, the two could hardly be more different in origin. One is a story about the curriculum; the other began as startup policy. In schools, too, they tend to sit in separate drawers: inquiry as "the class where you research, summarize, and present," and entrepreneurship education as "the special event where a founder comes to speak." I have had more and more occasions to talk with teachers, and my impression is that schools designing the two as one continuous form of learning are still a minority.

Read how MEXT actually defines entrepreneurship education, though, and the scenery changes. In a feature in its Board of Education Monthly, the ministry positioned it as "education that builds the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes to take on challenges toward solving problems and to explore solutions in collaboration with others"³. The word "explore" — the same word as inquiry — sits inside the definition itself. This is not education in how to incorporate a company; it is education in the attitude of stepping toward a problem and exploring solutions together. Follow this definition, and the most natural home for entrepreneurship education turns out to be the several hours a week already reserved for inquiry.

The person who has pushed this definition further, in the practice of university education, is Yoichi Ito. Ito is dean of Musashino University's Faculty of Entrepreneurship — nicknamed EMC — which opened in April 2021, where nearly all faculty are working practitioners and all first-year students live and learn together in a dormitory⁴. In a lecture for high school career guidance teachers, he defined entrepreneurship this way.

We define entrepreneurship as "the mindset of stepping forward without fear of failure, grounded in high aspiration and ethics, to create new value." Someone with aspiration but no ethics must not exist in society⁵

And as if to drive the point home, he added: "Entrepreneurship translates literally as 'the entrepreneur's spirit,' but it is not only for people who start companies. Every person must have it"⁵. In a lecture to high school students he repeated the point: it is "needed by company employees, public servants, and teachers alike — the simple idea of doing what you want to do"⁶. Not a special program for the few students who will found startups, but an education in mindset for everyone. In its audience, too, it maps exactly onto the inquiry period that every student takes.

Put the goal texts side by side, and the shared skeleton shows through

The overlap in language is not a matter of vibes. Here is the original goal text for the Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study. Chapter 4 of the Courses of Study for high schools states the goal as follows¹.

Working from the perspective of inquiry, and through cross-disciplinary and integrated learning, students shall consider their own way of being and living while developing the qualities and abilities to discover and solve problems well.

The crucial parts are items (2) and (3) that follow. Item (2) reads: "find a question from the relationship between real society, real life, and the self; set your own task; gather information; organize and analyze it; and summarize and express it." Item (3) reads: "engage in inquiry independently and collaboratively, and, while drawing on one another's strengths, cultivate the attitude of creating new value and seeking to realize a better society"¹.

"Creating new value." It is nearly word for word the phrase in Ito's definition — "the mindset of creating new value." The people who wrote the Courses of Study and the person who built a faculty of entrepreneurship are pointing at the same summit from different trailheads. When I call these two forms of education "the same backbone," this textual match is my first piece of evidence. Incidentally, the goal of the former Period for Integrated Study contained no phrase about "new value." The line was added in the revision that created the inquiry period, and it happens to coincide with the definition of entrepreneurship education. Less a coincidence, I think, than a sign that the country as a whole began facing the same direction.

The processes correspond as well. On the cycle of learning, Ito explains: "First, it is important to provide a stimulating input. Then, once you notice something — an a-ha — try something," and "Hold a dream, reflect, notice, and try. This repetition becomes growth"⁵. Set beside the inquiry process, the mapping looks like this.

Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study (Courses of Study goals)	The learning cycle in entrepreneurship education (Yoichi Ito)	The shared act
Find a question from the relationship between real society, real life, and the self	Gain an a-ha (insight) from a stimulating input	Place the starting point inside yourself
Set your own task	Answer "What do you want to do?" in your own words	Give your intent the shape of a task
Gather information, organize and analyze it	Try first, and collect the feel of reality as material	Gather material while moving
Summarize and express	Speak. State your thinking in one minute	Put it into words and deliver it to others
Move toward the next question	Reflect, notice, and try again	Turn insight into the next step

The emphases differ, of course. Inquiry walks students carefully through the intellectual procedures of gathering, organizing, and analyzing information, while entrepreneurship education puts "try it" first. Ito says: "It is not that you cannot act because motivation will not come. Motivation will not come because you are not acting. So try first"⁷. In his lecture he goes as far as saying that "whether someone awakens to something is not a question of innate quality but a difference in action"⁵. Inquiry tends to research everything at the desk before moving; mix in a single drop of "move first" and the air in the classroom changes considerably. Conversely, graft inquiry's "organize and analyze" procedures onto startup-experience activities that tend to run on momentum alone, and the activity settles into learning. Because the skeleton is the same, each can transfuse its strengths into the other.

Why "What do you want to do?" works in inquiry too

Back to Ito's key phrase. In his lecture for high school career guidance teachers in Aomori, he said this.

Continuing to ask "What do you want to do?" is the essence of entrepreneurship education. You help students give shape to what they feel⁵

He continued: "Entrepreneurship education comes down to the question 'What do you want to do?' Career education is the same"⁵. I believe we may add a line: inquiry is the same. The reason sits in the opening words of goal (2) in the Courses of Study — "find a question from the relationship between real society, real life, and the self." Questions are not supposed to fall from the society side; the text explicitly says they are found in the relationship between society and the self.

In actual classrooms, this order often flips. Pick one of the seventeen SDGs. Choose from this list of local issues. Hand out themes from the outside, and students begin their research without ever passing through "what do I want to do?" It has the form of inquiry, but the backbone is missing. This is not an accusation against schools. Let forty students set themes freely and things can spiral — I understand the realities. Even so, whether you insert "What do you want to do?" at the entrance of theme-setting is, I believe, the fork that decides whether inquiry becomes inquiry.

Ito has long framed this begin-from-yourself stance, since his days running Yahoo! Academia, with the phrase "Lead the Self." The root of leadership is not the skill of directing others but leading yourself first — carving out your own future on your own will⁸. In the note he wrote announcing the concept for the new faculty, he wrote of "walking a road with no map" and set out an image of people who "feel their connection to society and generate new value for it"⁹. The first step of walking on your own will is putting your intent into words. Theme-setting in inquiry can be designed as exactly that practice.

There is one more piece: the air of the classroom. Ito says: "One more important thing is to never laugh at dreams. The environment must be one where everyone speaks their dream and steps into action"⁵. Ask "What do you want to do?" in a classroom where an honest answer gets laughed at, and students will not voice what they really feel. Alongside the technique of questioning, you need the technique of building a room that is safe to speak in. The routines in the next section were chosen to cover both.

Questioning and reflection routines you can use in tomorrow's inquiry class

From here, practice. Of the methods Ito has described in public, I have organized the ones that can be carried into a high school inquiry class with no tools at all, as five routines by scene.

The first is the theme-setting question. Instead of "choose a social issue," start from a translation of "What do you want to do?" What have you been unable to stop thinking about lately? In what moment did you feel you could not leave something alone? It does not need to be well put — just get the snag into words. The fragments that surface here become the seeds of what goal (2) calls "a question found from the relationship with the self." For students who produce no seeds, the Ito way is to deliver a stimulating input first. Catch the moment something moves them, and grow it into a question from there.

The second is building a culture of dialogue. As a way to root dialogue in a school, Ito describes a concrete procedure: "Everyone repeats a one-minute self-introduction three times. The people around them respond with 'nice.' Do that, and anyone becomes able to speak, without fail. Human beings fundamentally want to talk"⁵. One minute, three times, listeners receive it with "nice." Zero preparation required. You can drop it straight into the first session after forming inquiry groups.

The third is the one-on-one with a stalled student. When progress stops, the temptation is to ask, "Are you on schedule?" But what Ito offers as the way to be with a student who is struggling is this: "Talk one-on-one, and simply listen. Do not judge; just keep asking questions and keep listening"⁵. Suspend evaluation and hear them out. A single meeting in which the teacher listens ninety percent of the time can return a student to their own words. On running classes at EMC, Ito explains that "ten percent of class time goes to input and ninety percent is interactive" and that "faculty devote themselves to coaching," adding: "Ethics can be taught to a degree, but the mindset of 'this is what I want to do' cannot be taught. Students have to think, look inward, and talk it through themselves"⁵. Mindset cannot be taught; it can only be drawn out through dialogue. As a philosophy for guiding inquiry, does that not carry over word for word?

The fourth is verbalizing reflection. Ito says that "even doing the same thing, continuing to reflect produces a large difference over time"⁵, and on Musashino EMC's online seminar page for high school students he offers this message: "Growth comes in the number of realizations — 'So that is what it was!' 'So this is what I love!'"¹⁰. Do not let the reflection sheet end as an impressions essay. Every session, have students write down and say aloud one thing: what was today's biggest realization? Keep insights in a countable form, and at the end of the term students can see their own change.

The fifth is giving students a small taste of the real thing. Ito points out: "At commercial and agricultural high schools, when students actually try it — selling products or crops — their persuasiveness becomes completely different"⁵. Sell the prototype, even if it is rough. Put the survey in front of adults outside the school, even if it is simple. Refuse to let the midterm presentation end inside the classroom; create one point of contact with real society, and you take one step closer to goal (3), "creating new value."

Scene	The usual move	The "What do you want to do?" move
Theme-setting	Have students pick from a list of issues	Have them verbalize what they cannot stop thinking about
Course kickoff	The teacher keeps explaining	One-minute self-introductions, three times; listeners answer "nice"
One-on-one with a stalled student	Check progress against the plan	Do not judge; keep asking and simply listen
Every reflection	Collect an impressions essay	Have them verbalize one realization from today
Midterm presentation	Ends inside the classroom	Test it once against the real world, prototype and all

The left column is not wrong. But the left column alone produces students who get through it, while mixing in the right column produces students who start to move. That difference compounds, and inquiry turns into soil for entrepreneurship. For running inquiry with generative AI as a partner, see the practical article on high school inquiry-based learning and generative AI; for angles on theme-setting, see the collection of 50 AI inquiry themes.

The policy wind is at your back, and you can borrow strength from outside the school

This intersection is thickening from the policy side as well. The FY2026 priority track of the Super Science High School (SSH) program includes a category called "innovation co-creation," explicitly described as "developing people who aspire to create new value (entrepreneurship education, etc.)"¹¹. SSH — the citadel of science-track inquiry — has named entrepreneurship education as an object of support. The grand design for high school reform that MEXT formulated in February 2026, the N-E.X.T. High School Vision, likewise lists "making business experience a requirement" and "corporate-endowed courses for high schools" among example initiatives for vocational high schools¹². I laid out the full picture of the vision in the guide to the N-E.X.T. High School Vision.

There are also public programs that cost nothing. The entrepreneurship education support program of the SME Support Japan (the Organization for Small and Medium Enterprises and Regional Innovation) provides standard curricula of five to thirty hours and dispatches founders as guest lecturers, free of charge, and the first implementation setting it lists is "the Period for Integrated/Inquiry-Based Study"¹³. Participating schools grew from 4 in FY2022 to 20 in FY2024¹³. On MEXT's side, a system is running in which Entrepreneurship Ambassadors appointed by the Minister of Education are dispatched to school classes and events³. The institutional design that assumes entrepreneurship education will run inside the inquiry period is already in place on the national side.

In the Aomori lecture, Ito noted that Japan's level of entrepreneurship ranks a strikingly low 26th in the world, and argued that creating new industries in the regions requires "not only founders — company employees, NPO staff, and school teachers are all needed"⁵. Teachers themselves are among the bearers. That said, schools do not need to shoulder alone the work of designing classes that connect inquiry and entrepreneurship education. At TIMEWELL, through WARP for Schools, our program for schools and educational institutions, we design inquiry-based learning that uses generative AI and walk alongside students until their own question takes the shape of a product. We have been involved in developing more than 500 people and have worked on WARP ENTRE, a partnership project with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. I myself am involved in supporting education at Musashino University's Faculty of Entrepreneurship, and I have watched learning that starts with "What do you want to do?" change people, at both the university and the high school level. If you work at a school and would like to design inquiry and entrepreneurship education as one continuous whole, feel free to take a look — starting with a simple exchange of notes is perfectly fine.

Summary

• Goal (3) of the Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study, "creating new value," and Yoichi Ito's definition of entrepreneurship, "the mindset of creating new value," are built from almost the same words.
• MEXT, too, defines entrepreneurship education as "education in the attitude of exploring solutions in collaboration with others," so the two forms of education overlap even in official language.
• The intersection is how questions are posed. Do not hand out themes from the outside; begin inquiry from a translation of "What do you want to do?", and the backbone that so often goes missing stays in place.
• Five routines are usable from tomorrow: verbalizing intent, one-minute self-introductions with "nice," non-judging one-on-ones, verbalizing one insight each time, and testing something small against the real world.
• The policy wind is strengthening as well, from SSH's innovation co-creation track to the N-E.X.T. High School Vision and free public programs.

There is no need to work at inquiry and entrepreneurship education as two separate jobs. Both are one and the same learning, beginning from "What do you want to do?" In the first five minutes of tomorrow's class, trim the theme explanation a little and ask your students this instead: What have you been unable to stop thinking about lately? You may find yourself present at the moment the air in the classroom changes.

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References

Related articles

• What Is the N-E.X.T. High School Vision? A Clear Guide to MEXT's High School Reform
• High School Inquiry-Based Learning × Generative AI: Practical Steps to Empower Students
• 50 AI Inquiry-Learning Themes: A Ready-to-Use Collection for Teachers
• What Is AI for Science? How AI Is Changing Scientific Research, and Japan's National Strategy

Footnotes

1. MEXT, "Comparison Table of the Courses of Study for Upper Secondary Schools: Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study" (2018 revision) ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. MEXT, "Subjects Common to All Departments and Standard Credits, Courses of Study for Upper Secondary Schools (2018 revision)" ↩

3. MEXT, Board of Education Monthly, May 2024, Feature 2: "Entrepreneurship Education for High School Students" ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Musashino University Faculty of Entrepreneurship (EMC) official site ↩

5. Aomori Prefectural Senior High School Education Research Association, transcript of the keynote lecture "Entrepreneurship Education and Career Education" by Yoichi Ito, 48th Career Guidance Division Research Conference (FY2024 research bulletin) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

6. Kyoiku Shimbun (Education Newspaper), "'This is exactly entrepreneurship': Yoichi Ito lectures, with students producing the event" ↩

7. Flying Penguin, interview with Yoichi Ito (February 2, 2024) ↩

8. GLOBIS Insights, lecture notes by Yoichi Ito on "Lead the Self" ↩

9. EMC official note, "We are creating a new faculty at Musashino University" (April 2, 2020, written by Yoichi Ito) ↩

10. Musashino University, "Musashino EMC Online Seminar for High School Students" ↩

11. MEXT / JST, "Super Science High School (SSH) Support Program" (FY2026, Attachment 2) ↩

12. MEXT, "Basic Policy on High School Education Reform (Grand Design): The N-E.X.T. High School Vision" (February 13, 2026) ↩

13. SME Support Japan, "FY2025 Entrepreneurship Education Program Implementation Support: Explanatory Materials" ↩ ↩²