TJTS5702 Lean Startups (5 cr)
Description
Content
In this course, students will become entrepreneurs and startuppers. They will work on their own idea or develop a new business idea jointly from scratch. The students can simulate the life of a startup as a course exercise or establish a real company. The core goal of the course is to gain an increased understanding of how emergent innovations translate into commercial reality and might transform society. We survey case examples of both successful and failed businesses and generally grapple with the difficulties of deploying and diffusing products. We explore a range of business models and opportunities. Students learn to work in a startup team, validate ideas, problems and solutions and scale their business. Students will work on a startup project that develops throughout the term with weekly deliverables culminating in a public presentation on the Lean Startup Riot event.
Completion methods
Lectures, including also visiting lectures. Real-world group exercise, where the group creates an idea, validates the problem, develops an initial minimum viable product. The course ends in a public pitching event -the Lean Startup Riot.
Assessment details
Passing the course requires active participation, working on the exercises, delivering the results and presenting them. The course performance is evaluated by practical startup-project work using the following evaluation criteria: 1) startup readiness, 2) execution and business plausibility and 3) innovativeness.
Learning outcomes
On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:
- understand the new venture creation process from opportunity recognition to the launch of a sustainable business
- know several tools to analyze business
- critically analyze business opportunities
- write a business model description
- develop their entrepreneurial and creative thinking and problem-solving skills
- improve their communication and presentation skills
Description of prerequisites
This course assumes that you have already completed your bachelor’s studies and you are currently doing your master’s or doctoral studies.
Literature
- Blank, S. (2013). Why the lean start-up changes everything. Harvard Business Review, 91(5), 63-72.
- Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y., & Tucci, C. L. (2005). Clarifying business models: Origins, present, and future of the concept. Communications of the association for Information Systems, 16(1), 1-25.
- Ries, E. (2011). The lean startup: How today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. Random House LLC.
- Nguyen-Duc, Anh, Jürgen Münch, Rafael Prikladnicki, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson. eds. (2020) Fundamentals of Software Startups, Springer, Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-35983-6