Developing entrepreneurial opportunities

Aims of the course

• Promoting entrepreneurial mindsets among young people
• Reviving and encouraging creativity and innovation
• Developing the capacity of creative confidence and accountability
• Learning about and using different methods of learning about the needs of users
• Encouraging students to introduce modern and efficient development process of products / services and business planning
• Recognizing and use a variety of prototyping methods and techniques
• To provide students with a tool for continuous improvement (of products, services, processes)
• Recognizing and use different methods of market testing
• To present the idea development to the prototype phase
• Developing business presentation for different audiences

Course syllabus

The aim of the course is to facilitate creative thinking of students that results in identifying, exploring and developing entrepreneurial opportunities. Those opportunities are grounded in needs that occur in all areas of human life, in profit and non-profit sphere. The goal is that students acquire theoretical foundations related to entrepreneurial opportunities and work on group projects that build on exploring entrepreneurial opportunities, defining solutions, developing a prototype of a solution and user testing.

1. Opportunity recognition: exploration and exploitation

2. Development of a prototype of a selected opportunity based on Design Thinking methodology:
- empathy
- define
- ideate
- prototype
- test
Design Thinking process draws on methods from engineering and design, and combines them with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences, and insights from the business world. The process provides a glue that brings teammates from vastly different fields together around a common goal: make the lives of the people they’re designing for better.

Design thinking revolves around three key phases:
inspiration, ideation, and implementation. The phases are not linear; they can take place concurrently and can also be repeated to build up ideas along the continuum of innovation. The design thinking process allows information and ideas to be organized, choices to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge to be gained. Design Thinking is, inherently, a prototyping process powering deep understanding of what people need in their lives as well as what they like (or not) about the way that solution is made, packaged, marketed, sold, and supported.

3. Public presentations of projects and developed prototypes

Course director(s)

  • Office Hours
  • Tuesday at 11:30 in P-310
 
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