CORE COURSE

• Leadership as an Entrepreneurial Mindset. This course focuses on entrepreneurial leadership and organizing people to achieve common goals by optimizing risk, innovating to take advantage of opportunities, and managing change within a dynamic environment. Course content will address issues faced by managers who wish to encourage innovation and creativity in their organizations, develop a culture that fosters entrepreneurial behavior, and turns ideas into viable businesses that create value.

ELECTIVES

• Social Entrepreneurship. This course is a survey of critical, contemporary innovative management models and methodologies encapsulated under the umbrella of social entrepreneurship. This growing area of graduate business education is viewed as imperative in preparing leaders of global enterprises. Social entrepreneurship is a rapidly developing and changing business field in which business and nonprofit leaders design, grow, and lead mission-driven enterprises with measurable social impact. As the conventional lines between nonprofit enterprises, government, and business blur, it is essential that managers understand the opportunities and challenges in this new landscape.
• New Venture Creation. This course focuses on the issues faced by start-ups and early-stage enterprises including generation of ideas and how to screen and evaluate them. The market validation process is also examined. Students will work in teams learning how to turn a great idea into a great company. This class is not about how to write a business plan, it is about how to develop a viable business model utilizing the Lean Startup methodology. Students will be talking to customers, partners, competitors, as they encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a successful startup is actually formed. Students will then learn how agile development can help them rapidly iterate their offering into something customers will buy and us. Students will also be challenged with issues regarding how to build and manage a startup team.
• Family Business in the 21st Century. Family owned businesses are ubiquitous and growing in the US and around the world. They comprise 80-90% of all businesses and cover the spectrum of small mom and pops to multi-billion dollar, complex, global enterprises. Families control 35% of Fortune 500 companies. Regardless of the size, family businesses have long been and continue to be an economic engine. The origins of these family enterprises are often entrepreneurial and, as a result, these families can expand their holdings from the original operating business to other entities, including trusts, investment funds, holding companies, family offices, and charitable foundations. Given the dominant presence of family enterprises in the business world, students of business are likely to encounter, work for, work with, or be a member of a business family. While family enterprises can have much in common with non-family, private or publicly held companies, there are characteristics that are unique only to family businesses. This course is an introduction to the basic concepts specific to family enterprises such as governance, ownership structures, values-based decision making, succession planning, intra-family conflict management and inter-generational dynamics, and will give students the understanding of the challenges and opportunities of family enterprises in order to be informed employees, owners and/or shareholders.
• Product Concept Development. In this course students will learn methodologies for identifying customer needs, developing new product concepts, prototype development, estimation of manufacturing costs, and developing business models to support the development and marketing of these products. In this class students will have the opportunity to develop their own product concepts. Product concepts pursued in this course will be products where it is feasible to build proof-of-concept prototypes over the course of the semester. Funding opportunities for prototype development will be covered including grants and design contests.
• Sales & Marketing Entrepreneurs. This course focuses on the issues of creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers of entrepreneurial ventures. Topics include in-depth analysis of customer need versus customer demand, managing the sales process, market research and sales promotion with limited resources, interpreting customer feedback in Beta trials, utilizing technology to optimize and automate components of the marketing and sales function, and developing and implementing a comprehensive go-to-market strategy.
• Crowdfunding. This hands-on course gives students the opportunity to plan a crowdfunding campaign for a creative project or entrepreneurial venture. Students will be responsible for designing campaigns that include stakeholder alignment, concept testing, and product pre-selling. Teams work to design a crowdfunding campaign which may be executed following the course. The focal point of the course is the planning, production and refinement of a pitch video. This course will incorporate speakers who have successfully executed crowdfunding campaigns. Students will learn about the important differences between equity and non-equity crowdfunding as well as other ways to bring a product to market with limited upfront capital.
• Raising Capital for Entrepreneurs. This course starts with forming a company and deciding how to allocate the initial equity among the founders, then funding the early stage of the startup by the founders, friends and family investors. Each class session covers a different phase of capital raising including placing a valuation on the company for each phase and the terms that are typically found in deals with angel investors, venture capital investors, strategic partners and others. Teams negotiate the terms for each type of financing with the instructor playing the role of the investor. Other sources of capital are discussed including grants from governmental agencies, loans from small business investment companies and, at a later stage, loans from commercial banks. We then take the company through an initial public offering.
• Commercializing Technology and Science. The course covers five main themes: 1) market need assessment 2) technology strategy 3) business model design, 4) team development, and 5) leadership. We will cover such issues as managing risky technological bets, selecting and resourcing projects, building teams and managing scientists in a commercial setting (i.e., NASA), incentive design, intellectual property strategies, licensing and partnering, vertical integration decisions, and financing of science-based ventures. The course includes case materials from a broad array of science-based sectors, including sensors, alternative
• Entrepreneurial Venture. This introductory course serves as an overview of the entrepreneurial venture with a focus on the many ways it differs from traditional companies. Several important topics are covered including the life cycle of a business, strategy development, managing growth and exit strategies. The course also covers cash flow, bootstrapping, and early stage financing for entrepreneurial ventures. These topics and others will be engaged in more deeply by students through guest lecturers and immersion trips to benchmark entrepreneurial enterprises.
• Applied Financial Management. This course reinforces the financial principles learned in DBC 504 by applying these concepts in a case format. The course also examines special advanced topics in financial management such as lease analysis, the use of warrants and convertible bonds in financing, the use of Monte Carlo simulation in capital budgeting, and the use of derivative securities in a corporate finance setting.
• Strategic Marketing. This course provides students with solid experience in creating market-driving strategies for the future success of a business. A focus is on discovering and developing a set of unique competencies for a firm that, through strategic differentiation, leads to sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. Students are provided ample opportunity to develop and practice creative problem-solving and decision-making skills to simulate the requirements of today’s complex market environment. Industry analyses will be performed that includes the following: internal/external analysis, customer analysis, competitor analysis, market/submarket analysis, and comparative strategy assessment.
• Strategic Sales Leadership. This course focuses on the core business process of securing, developing, and maintaining long term relationships with profitable customers in the business-to-business market space. Issues of creating, communicating, and delivering value are central to the course. Managing the customer relationship initiative in the firm, whether driven by one-to-one seller-buyer interactions or technology-driven processes, is a central theme. Innovation and leadership on the customer management side of the enterprise are important overarching topics.