Entrepreneurship (ENTR)

This course focuses on the role of entrepreneurship in tackling sustainability challenges. Students will learn concepts of social value, co-creation, responsible innovation, and social crowdfunding. Students will understand the determinants and forces shaping sustainable entrepreneurship and identify sustainability challenges, and potential solutions via the implementation of sustainable business models.

Students are exposed to topics of innovation and entrepreneurship as catalyst for economic activity, and the characteristics and behaviours of innovators and entrepreneurs. The focus is on current methodologies like design thinking, observation, brainstorming, and ideation to identify and solve significant and complex problems that need a multidisciplinary approach.

Entrepreneurial students experience the lean start-up methodology – validating new products and business models using the principles of customer discovery. Student founders explore, create and test minimum viable products to launch and sell, and manage successful enterprises. Through active learning techniques, students are immersed in building innovations with similarly-minded entrepreneurs.

Topics include: income versus. inheritance, management and promotion, bringing non-family resources to the firm, harvest and sell out strategies, succession, deciding to join the family firm, establishing credibility as a daughter or son, stages of family business growth. The course also explores organizational creativity and how innovation is developed and carried out in family business, and the innovation drivers and barriers in family business.

Students are introduced to the challenges in starting and running a new venture. Through lectures and cases, students are introduced to the personal qualities that define an entrepreneurial mindset. The concepts necessary to finance and develop innovative ideas are discussed. Each student creates and runs a business for the term, concluding with a trade fair of all student businesses.

Venture Captial is designed to finance rapid-growth, scalable start-ups. Students explore risk-laden investments in entrepreneurial and innovative firms. Students investigate value propositions, financing, and venture teams of clean tech, life sciences, and ICT start-ups. Students practice authoring investment memos. Lectures are supplemented with visits by guest VCs, entrepreneurs, and local living cases.

Students consider the risks associated with entrepreneurial firms by managing a venture fund and making investments in innovative start-ups with sustainable objectives., Students raise fund capital, conduct due diligence, assess the innovative capacity of companies. A highly applied course, students are also mentored by venture capitalists in class.

Students are led through the development of the major elements of a business plan for a new venture. As a planning and financing tool, the business plan outlines in detail and specifically quantifies market potential, competition, production and operational requirements, finance, management and the overall feasibility of a possible new venture.

Students to work with a small business owner/manager to identify a small business problem, to develop a workable solution to the problem, and to implement that solution.