This course provides teams with real-world, hands-on learning experience with customer discovery and successfully transferring knowledge into products and processes that benefit society. Trainees will spend time talking to and learning from customers, partners and competitors, and learning how to deal with the chaos and uncertainty of commercializing innovations and creating startup. Teams will be spending a significant amount of time outside the building, talking to customers and developing and validating their hypotheses. Class time will be spent on the teams’ key learnings from talking to customers, not what they already knew coming into the course. While the course is build based on experiential learning methods and customer data, appropriate guidance and support will be provided by the trainer. This includes teaching relevant applied instruments, using which learner will have a chance to apply the learnt material using hands-on exercises.

The course is designed using contemporary customer discovery methodology. It is an iterative process of physically getting out of the building to interview potential customers and stakeholders to understand their problems and pain points in the market and in society. These interviews, or experiments, lead to real-world learnings and insights that validate or invalidate key components of the business model, often leading to pivots. Therefore, students are required to dedicate considerable amount of time outside the classroom to complement the on-campus session.

This course is aimed at exposing the students to modern approaches to new venture creation. It focuses on the nexus between the entrepreneurial mindset, the market opportunity and the iterative process of venture development they engage with. It is designed for anyone who needs to assess, develop or create potential business or project opportunities that are mainly, but not exclusively, based on a technological concept or a social innovation.

By the end of the course, you will: