Entrepreneurship Strategy Course

Gain critical Entrepreneurship knowledge by actually running a startup

The Entrepreneurship Strategy Course is built with the Entrepreneurship Game at its core — where you will join the founding team of DX Technologies. DX is a high growth startup that was launched by serial inventor and entrepreneur Dr. Darla Xavier. She recently developed a revolutionary handheld food scanner device called a crossmorphic sensor that allows you to scan food for calorie and nutritional information. Dr. Xavier has many strengths, including being a brilliant engineer, but she has no patience for handling all the business decisions ahead of her. Fortunately she's no longer worried because she has you and the rest of your founding team to take charge of these matters. For DX to succeed, you'll have to make key decisions that affect the future of the startup: learn how to size potential markets; negotiate with customers; conduct business experiments; and find investors to fund your venture—all while managing hiring, finance, offshore production, and marketing. The challenges are realistic and engaging, drawn from the experiences of successful founders of startup companies and the latest entrepreneurship research. This course is a flight simulator for entrepreneurs – giving you a chance to learn hard-won lessons so you'll be ready when you encounter them in real life.  

What you will learn

1. Learning Objectives

• Building a founding team: equity agreements, team dynamics, chartering
• Financing a venture: cash flow, funding choices, terms, sources of capital
• Business experiments: data gathering, hypothesis testing, pivoting
• Hiring and scaling: candidate screening, interviewing, selection
• Sales and marketing: selecting product features, securing sales, selecting key customers
• Negotiations: establishing positions, analyzing bargaining power, conducting high-stakes negotiations
• Pitching and persuasion: building pitch decks, giving elevator pitches, explaining a startup
• Leadership: inspiring a team, avoiding common pitfalls, achieving consensus

2. Experience Objectives

• Experiencing the types of data that are generated by business experiments: surveys, market tests, and interviews
• Encountering key documents used by startups: pitch materials, legal agreements, and market research
• Engaging with critical stakeholders in high-stakes settings: funders, customers, and employees
• Navigating through common points of failure for startups: team conflict, scaling, and process loss

3. Thinking Objectives

• Perspective-taking and the ability to analyze multiple viewpoints
• Improvisation and bricolage; making do with what you have to solve novel problems
• Self-monitoring and metacognition
• Self-efficacy and the confidence to accomplish entrepreneurial challenges