Document Type

Syllabus

Publication Date

Spring 2024

Course Description

This experiential course bridges the ‘knowing – doing’ gap and inserts you directly into the exciting world of startups and new venture creation. It will require you to perform both as an individual contributor and as a highly effective team member. This is a demanding course, fast paced, and all deliverables are expected to be of the highest quality. This course has several high-level objectives including:

  • Increase your understanding of the entrepreneurial process and the issues faced by high growth potential start-ups as they try to gain traction in the market and with investors.
  • Afford you a firsthand entrepreneurship experience and direct engagement with the startup ecosystem in Indiana.
  • Through application, increase your understanding of marketing, strategy, finance, operations, product development and the managerial implications of each.

Build your executive confidence, in terms of the ability to effectively work on teams, analyze complex problems, quickly develop recommendations, and communicate them effectively to different stakeholders. Students will work alongside startup teams throughout the semester and provide deliverables to support an existing startup team.

This class is focused on scalable / investable business models with realistic startup costs, offering a high potential return (with associated higher risks). Successful concepts are typically more scalable than established business and have the potential during their early stages to grow rapidly with modest investment of resources and capital. The course excludes ‘lifestyle businesses’ and most ‘not for profit’ concepts as the concepts must be attractive to outside investors/stakeholders

Student Outcomes

As the result of this course, students should:

  • Understand the role of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial process in driving future prosperity and in solving worldwide problems.
  • Understand the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the roles that investors, advisors, consultants, accelerators and incubators, banks, and others play in fuels the entrepreneurial engine.
  • Understand that entrepreneurship is a vehicle to create different kinds of value and that these different value types are not mutually exclusive.
  • Understand the critical components of entrepreneurial behavior as well as the common myths of entrepreneurship.
  • Explore the notion of cognitive dexterity and the creative and predictive approaches to problem solving.
  • Understand the concept of an entrepreneur’s personal inventory and the notion of affordable loss.
  • Understand how entrepreneurs understand problems as opportunities and develop potential solutions.
  • Understand how pattern recognition has lead to the development of several strategic frameworks and how these can be applied to the process of opportunity identification and assessment.
  • Understand how to develop and weigh relevant evaluation criteria and assess and apply existing opportunity assessment checklists to support opportunity assessment.
  • Use the Business Model Canvas to develop and assess business model concepts understanding the core components of the model and their relationship.
  • Understand sources of innovation and sustainable competitive advantage.
  • Understand the stages of development that a startup enterprise experiences and the strategies and competencies required to support success in each phase.
  • Understand potential sources of funds throughout the startup lifecycle and the process for developing and implementing fund raising strategies.
  • Understand the role and specific value presented by key players in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
  • Understand how entrepreneurs engage with investors, investor strategies and decision making, company valuation methods, due diligence processes and deal structures and critical terms.
  • Understanding how debt and other non equity financing can support startup growth.
  • Understand harvesting options and their importance in the entrepreneurial process

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