Applied Entrepreneurship

General characterization

Prerequisites

Available soon

Bibliography

•    Alexander Osterwalder, “Business Model Generation”
•    Steve Blank & Dorf, “The Startup Owner’s Manual”
•    Eric Ries, “The Lean Startup”

Teaching method

Pre-requisites
1.    Interest in Entrepreneurship and motivation to at least evaluate launching their own business.
2.    Passion, curiosity, resilience and agility. Interest in discovering how an idea can become a real company.
3.    Each participant must commit to class time plus 5 additional hours a week for Market Validation.
4.    Amount of Work- Teams will be spending a significant amount of time in between each of the classes outside the university, talking to customers and testing hypotheses. Getting out of the building is what the effort is about. If students can’t commit the time, then this course probably is not for them.


Class Dynamic
This class is team-based. Working and studying will be done in teams. Students will form team and they must submit a proposal for a project to be worked during the entire course. The teams will self-organize and establish individual roles on their own. There are no formal CEO/VP’s, just the constant parsing and allocating of the tasks that need to be done. Teams will be learning how to turn their ideas, research and technology into a product, service or process that benefits society. They’ll learn how to use a business model to brainstorm each part of an enterprise and customer development to get out of the building to see whether anyone other than they would want/use their product. Each week will be a new challenge as they design experiments and run hypotheses tests on each part of their business model and customers. Finally, they’ll see how agile development can help them rapidly iterate their product to build something potential customers will use and buy. Weekly, in a short presentation they’ll share the hard earned knowledge with the rest of the class.
Working with their teams, they will encounter issues on how to build and work with a team and we will help them understand how to build and manage the startup team.
In addition to the instructors, and depending on the feasibility and availability, each team could be assigned a mentor (an experienced entrepreneur, service provider, consultant, or investor) to provide assistance and support

Class Culture
Entrepreneurs/Startups communicate much differently than the university culture most of students are familiar with. At times it can feel brusque and impersonal, but in reality is focused and oriented to create immediate action in time- and cash-constrained environments. We have limited time and we ?push, challenge, and question teams in the hope they will quickly learn. We will be direct, open, and tough – just like the real world. Of course, these comments aren’t personal, but part of the process.?We also expect students to question us, challenge our point of view if they disagree, and engage in a real dialog with the teaching team. This approach may seem harsh or abrupt, but it is all part of our wanting teams to learn to challenge themselves quickly and objectively, and to
 
appreciate that as entrepreneurs they need to learn and evolve faster than they ever imagined possible.

Evaluation method

The Assessment criteria aims to evaluate not only theoretical learning but also the practical and applied dimension of this course. The final grade will be composed of:
1.    Practical grade (30%) – including weekly lessons learned presentations (uploaded on moodle), class attendance and participation
2.    Peer Evaluation (10%) – each student will be evaluated by their peers within each team
3.    Final Pitch Presentation (30%) – final pitch presentation to a panel of guests
4.    Final Exam (30%)

Subject matter

This course provides insight and methodologies, tools and processes to discover opportunities, create and kickstart a new startup, both as creating your own business as well as proactively starting a new venture inside a corporate (intrapreneurship).

We will be covering the key steps needed to build a new venture, fostering real hands-on learning on what it’s like to actually start a company. The goal, within the constraints of a classroom and a limited amount of time, is to create an entrepreneurial experience for students with all of the pressures and demands of the real-world in an early stage startup. The class is designed to give students the experience of how to work as a team and turn an idea into a company.

This course takes participants down the pathway to building an idea into a venture. It is not about writing a business plan or doing library research. Students will be teaming-up to build a project from scratch and will be talking to actual customers and partners for their idea and learning the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works. They’ll learn how to use a business model to brainstorm each part of a company and Customer Development to get out of the classroom and interact with real prospects to see if anyone other than themselves would actually want/use their product.

Programs

Programs where the course is taught: