Content, progress and pedagogy of the module

New Venture Creation is a cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship course open to 9th semester students. The elective equips enrolled students with an entrepreneurial skillset, opportunistic networking and fosters innovation and new business start-ups. This course is aimed at all would-be entrepreneurs, established entrepreneurs and students interested in business development processes.

The course is designed as a live case environment, where the cases being analyzed are the actual, real-time experiences of students going through the entrepreneurial process of starting a company. To facilitate the development of ventures, the course embarks on both a theoretical framework and business development guidance to support and raise the prospects of success. Hence, the fundamental components from venturing a business will be taught, but more importantly, the students will gain a hands-on experience in entrepreneurship.

The module is based on a mixture of activities, including lectures, workshops, seminars, as well as creative and team-based processes, which are facilitated by lecturers. The module will include weekly lessons-learned presentations and written assignments, which all are related to the entrepreneurial process of creating new business activities within existing organizations.

The main topics are:

Opportunity spotting and Customer Development
Identify/create business opportunities; research, analysis and market evaluation, customer insight and quantitative data, creative processes, and design-thinking, running experiments to test hypotheses on the market.

Team building, negotiating, and networking
Identifying competences and assembling your team, establishing value chains and strategic partnerships.

Business modelling
Value proposition design and business model design, i.e., value creation, value delivery, value capturing.

Product/service development, management, and business planning
Strategy, marketing, finance/funding, valuation techniques, analysis of key risk and scenarios, legal aspects, IP.

Reporting, presenting, and pitching
New business idea/business plan to company sponsors.

Learning objectives

Knowledge

The objective is that the student after the module possesses the necessary knowledge on:

• verifying business ideas/problems and validating needs/pains from customers, including assessing potential market opportunities and validating assumptions regarding the target market.
• understanding some of the key drivers that impact upon the successful creation and management of a new venture (in a separate entity or within an existing organisation.
• appreciating the importance of business models, customer development and agile development in the process of new venture creation/corporate venturing.
• understanding fundamental aspects of sustainability, hereunder the UN sustainability development goal, in connection to entrepreneurship and business development.

Skills

The objective is that the student after the module possesses the necessary skills in:

• generating new business ideas and validating these, including, and assessing the resources required to pursue an opportunity. This includes critically assessing new business ideas based on evidence from the market and to prototype a Minimal Viable Product.
• incorporation of sustainability drivers and development of sustainable business models.
• understanding and mastering various physical and digital tools for MVP/MVE prototyping hereunder visualization tools, presentation tools, landing page, platform, and video editing.
• understanding the skills and resources needed to create an entrepreneurial organisation further apprehend different business model configurations and business model innovation routes in the entrepreneurial process.

Competences

 The objective is that the student after the module possesses the necessary competences in:

• creating business opportunities and further understanding how to acquire necessary resources to pursue the identified business opportunity.
• designing business models to match the identified business opportunity, evidence from the market (and the host company).
• pitching the business model of a new venture, the underlying validation process, and its academic relevance.

Type of instruction

For informaton see §17.

Exam

Exams