Financing Entrepreneurial Ventures/Entrepreneurial Financing
This course is designed to introduce how a startup gets funding along its growth stage. While startups, specifically the high-tech oriented, develop disruptive and innovative products that incorporate high uncertainty, the small entrepreneurs usually lack monetary assets to commercialize the products. Thus they often seek funding from a group of professional investors such as angels, venture capitals (VCs), big firms and/or governments. The funding process often requires a series of pitching, meticulous evaluation, endless negotiation and the pressure of execution of what is promised at the timing of contract. Not to mention fierce competition with other startups or even big firms. To help the next-generation entrepreneurs successfully secure funding and process to the next steps, this course will introduce essential knowledge and skills to find the right type of investors depending on the nature of her business, to come up with an objective evaluation of her firm value, to suggest those in convincing ways and to manage the networks with both actual and potential investors.
Managing Technological Innovation
This course teaches hands-on management skills regarding innovation and is recommended for students planning to work in industry after they receive their degrees. It will cover the frameworks, models, and tools essential for the innovation process within a firm and apply them to case studies illustrating their importance. The course will progress in two parts. The strategic dimension will discuss how managers and executives can identify potential conflicts and complementarities between the firm’s technological assets and other resources both within and outside the organization. It will also provide useful tools for identifying which technologies are likely to succeed in markets, and which firms are best positioned to profit from this innovation. The management dimension of the course will discuss how firms develop innovative capabilities. It will also address the organization of the R&D function and the enabling of innovation through new products and processes. The teaching will combine case studies and lectures.
Start-up Leadership
Among the many management challenges an entrepreneur will run into, managing people might be the one which can’t be outsourced to other professionals. An excellent leader-entrepreneur is ethical and effective. Students will learn basic constructs and theories on organizations, teams, behaviors, leadership, incentives and so on, get to know useful research results, and do exercises on organizational design, talent management, team and leadership in an entrepreneurial setting; learn basic elements of quality management systems that an entrepreneur should know and how to lead and manage systematically from the first day on. This course is also the student-version of the executive training course for entrepreneurs and leaders of small-media enterprises in QMS program.
Business Models
The study of business models investigates the interactions among all the stakeholders of the business, including enterprises, individual users, suppliers, and other participants. In different business models, the involved interactions present a variety of forms in terms of customer arrivals, flows of logistics and supply chains, information flows, and capital flows. This course will develop the analytical skills of students through case studies of business models, the exploration of new applications, new business model possibilities, highlighting new business models in traditional industries. Topics include electronic commerce, social networking platforms, new media, smart hardware, and online-to-offline models.
Innovation and Creativity in Commercial Design
To be developed
Business Prototyping
To be developed
Entrepreneurship Marketing
Entrepreneurship Marketing is organized to serve two purposes: (1) Training future business consultant for market analysis. Market analysis section covers the dominate market analysis models and methodologies, as well as the toolkits for developing business models. The goal here is to enable the students with systematic market logics and complements them with sophistical analysis tools; (2) Formulating emerging product manager. Targeting at new solutions for existing problems, product management section walks students through the whole process of product development: user experience collection and analysis, technological evaluation, prototyping and testing, and new product management. Particularly, product management will closely embrace the trend of Big Data and Internet Technology.
