Module description
What is the module about?
The ‘Crafting Entrepreneurial Opportunities’ course seeks to provide students with the skills, tools and mind-sets to enable them to discover and develop opportunities upon which entrepreneurial ventures may be built, whether as start-ups or in established firms. This course also seeks to build students’ real-world business sense and develop their presentation skills together with their ability to persuasively articulate a point of view about a business problem that needs to be resolved.
Who should do this module?
Discovery and development skills are fundamental for any manager who seeks to ‘do things differently’ in his or her organisation. Indeed, many graduates find themselves, in their first position at an organization, dropped into a setting where resolving performance problems requires discovering customer, user, and/or business needs and developing a suitable way forward to satisfy those needs. Thus, the course should serve students having career interests of all kinds, not just those who plan to start new ventures. Having said that, having some understanding of entrepreneurship is useful as a foundation upon which to build your knowledge of crafting opportunities.
Provisional Lecture Outline
Lecture 1: Introduction
Lecture 2: Idea Generation – Challenging Orthodoxy
Lecture 3: Idea Generation – Design Thinking
Lecture 4: Idea Selection
Lecture 5: Idea Development
Lecture 6: Idea Scaling
Lecture 7: Generating opportunities with a global appeal
Lecture 8: Generating ideas within companies
Lecture 9: Generating ideas that achieve a social purpose
Lecture 10: Groupwork Presentation
Assessment details
60% Individual Coursework
40% Group Coursework
Please note: There will be a groupwork component in the assessments (40% of the grade) where as a group you will be required to create and develop a new entrepreneurial opportunity. The groups are self-selected by students.
Teaching pattern
Weekly Workshops
Suggested reading list
There will be assigned readings for each week from top entrepreneurship and management journals such as Entrepreneurship, Theory & Practice, Business Venturing Journal, Strategic Management Journal, etc; as well as from Harvard Business Review. The emphasis will be on journal articles rather than books. But you can also refer to the following books if you like:
(Optional Reference) Textbooks
- Gibson, R. (2015). The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking. John Wiley & Sons.
- Reis, E. (2011). The lean startup. New York: Crown Business.
- Mullins, J. (2013). The New Business Road Test: What entrepreneurs and executives should do before launching a lean start-up. Pearson UK.