Entrepreneurship

General characterization

Prerequisites

n/a

Bibliography

The Startup Owner¿s Manual, Steve Blank & Dorf

Business Model Generation, Alexander Osterwalder, et al

The Lean Startup, Eric Ries

Additional bibliography:

Value proposition design, Alex Osterwalder

Testing Business Ideas, Alex Osterwalder

The startup way, Eric Ries

The innovators¿ method, Nathan Furr & Jeff Dyer

Additional resources:

Steve Blank, ¿What¿s a Startup? First Principles,¿ http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/ whats-a-startup-first-principles/

Steve Blank, ¿Make No Little Plans ¿ Defining the Scalable Startup,¿ http:// steveblank.com/2010/01/04/make-no-little-plans-¿-defining-the-scalable-startup/

Steve Blank, ¿A Startup is Not a Smaller Version of a Large Company¿, http:// steveblank.com/2010/01/14/a-startup-is-not-a-smaller-version-of-a-large-company/

Watch: Mark Pincus, ¿Quick and Frequent Product Testing and Assessment¿, http://¿ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2313

Teaching method

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.

Teaching / Learning methods:

We will use both lectures and workprojects in teams, during the entire semester, with weekly reporting and bi-weekly presentations for status report in the lessons learned theoretical classes.

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 elective class is not for them.

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'll 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

• 1. Final practical grade: (30%)

• 2. Pear evaluation: (10%)

• 3. Final pitch presentation: (30%)

• 4. Final exam: (30%)

Note: You are required to have a minimum grade of 9,5 in all the assessment components, except for Peer Evaluation.

(further information TBA)

Subject matter

This course provides insight and methodologies into entrepreneurship, 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 successful business and it fosters 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.

Each week’s class is organized around:

• 1. A lecture on one of the building blocks of a business model;

• 2. Team presentations on their “lessons learned” from getting out of the building and iterating with the market.

  3. Field lab session to apply teamwork and receive additional mentoring. 
  

Programs

Programs where the course is taught: