Course Syllabus

Innovation & Entrepreneurship in Europe

Course description

📸  Google Photos for our class

This course isn’t run like a classroom. It’s run like a startup incubator – a program that helps early-stage startups get off the ground.

You form teams and identify problems real customers have. You create hypotheses about your customer, their problem and your solution, then test them in the real world with interviews, surveys, and quick prototypes. Most of your first ideas won’t survive contact with customers. That’s expected: you iterate, pivot and sharpen until you have something worth presenting.

Along the way, you think like an innovator, using Lean Startup, the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Design and customer interviewing based on ‘The Mom Test’. Experienced mentors guide you, and you meet Copenhagen founders who share how they did it – including what went wrong and what they learned.

At the end, you pitch your startup to industry experts. They don’t judge you as students but as startup founders, with professional, direct feedback.

The course is hands-on, team-based and may ask more commitment than a typical class. In return, you get the experience of building something real and the satisfaction that comes with it.

Learning objectives

• Identify real customer needs through interviews and other research methods
• Build minimum viable products and use customer feedback to improve them
• Develop a business model for a startup venture
• Use failed experiments as evidence to iterate or pivot
• Work effectively in a startup team under uncertainty
• Present your startup clearly and convincingly

The expected workload outside of class is 24 hours for the 3-week course – almost all of it in your teams!

Faculty: Mikael Fuhr

Architect and industrial designer. Extensive experience in strategic design, innovation, communication and leadership. Design manager and project manager in DSB (Danish State Railways), Head of Design Vision Lab, Director of Design in DSB, Founder of FUHR.

Literature list

• Ries, Eric: The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, 2011
• Osterwalder, Alexander, et.al.: Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers and Challengers, 2010
• Osterwalder, Alexander, et.al.: Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want, 2010
• Constable, Giff: Talking To Humans 
• Fitzpatrick, Rob: The Mom Test

Grading

Grading (expanded)

In this course you must have a strong drive to learn by doing. This can be a challenge if you are used to ‘traditional’ lecture-based courses. Please do not select this course if you expect to study articles and take tests, expect the professor to lecture most of the time, or do not wish to apply your ideas in a real-life setting. This course demands that you engage with real customers to turn an idea into a business venture.

The class combines short lectures with multidisciplinary teamwork and close supervision. 

Individual grades for team assignments may be applied. The policy is that late assignments are not accepted.

Engagement (20% — indiv.)
This course requires a high level of motivation and active participation in class, and other activities. Attendance is mandatory. To earn a strong engagement grade, you need to:

• Do the prep for every class and come ready to use it.
• Contribute in class activities. Don’t just sit through them.
• Work well as a team. Plan your workload together, and deal with any team obstacles directly and professionally.
• Offer useful feedback to your peers, and act on what you get from them, customers and other people you meet during the course.
• Find and attend startup events in Copenhagen, and bring back what you learned to share with the class.
• Step out of your comfort zone and try approaches you’re unsure about. A bold attempt that fails counts for more than a safe one that doesn’t.

Business Model Canvas + Customer Discovery/Validation + Market Analysis (15% — team)

FORMAT: Team presentation (featuring all team members) + Submitted presentation revised based on class feedback.

You must elaborate on three topics:

Business Model Canvas: Explain the process and considerations of developing your Business Model Canvas. Focus on the process, describing primarily how and why you make a BMC and secondarily what your BMC looks like.

Customer Discovery and Customer Validation: Describe your team’s activities in the Lean Launchpad Customer Development steps of Customer Discovery and Customer Validation. Describe primarily which ways you interacted with customers and secondarily what you learned from customers that influenced your business idea. Customers don’t have to agree with you. Learning what they don’t want, and adjusting, is often the most valuable result..

Market Analysis: Good domain knowledge greatly improves a venture’s chances. You don’t need expert-level knowledge at this early stage, but you must show you understand the basic drivers of your market.

Minimum Viable Product Presentation (15% — team)

FORMAT: Presentation, including demo of your MVPs:

• Give an update on your customer development process. Particularly, how you have already used your MVPs with customers: Show this in your presentation with 'action' photos of you interacting with customers. Remember, an MVP that is not in use is pointless!
• Explain your choices in connection with your MVP (how did you establish what was 'minimum'?).
• Demo live MVP's, e.g. explainer video, landing page, website, app dummy or a physical prototype

You will be graded on efforts to build something that can generate feedback from customers. Your in-class demo is your first version, and it can be rough and flawed – that won’t cost you points. Playing it safe will. The more ways you can generate feedback via MVPs, the better. Experimentation and gutsiness are expected: Put it in public, approach strangers, ask people to pay or sign up. Getting rejected is data.

Investor Pitches (15% — individual)

FORMAT: Slide deck + final pitch to industry expert(s), structured as an investor pitch. The pitch must be delivered in 3 minutes. You will be judged on the structure, clarity, and delivery of the pitch.

Your pitch should include the following. Regard the list as the pitch content, not necessarily individual slides:

1. Company name and purpose
2. Problem — Jobs/Gains/Pains
3. Solution — Value proposition
4. How it works
5. Market analysis (incl. ‘Why now’)
6. Revenue model
7. Team and Team-Market fit
8. Your 'Ask', plan and expectations
9. [Appendix]

‘Explain and Reflect' Paper (35% — indiv.)

FORMAT: Written 1.500-word paper (+10% extra is acceptable). Appendix, and reference list don’t count.

Walk a reader through your journey in this course, step by step, as if you were teaching what you learned to someone new to startups. Show it visually as well as in words, and reflect on the moments that mattered.:

1. Your process: The methods you used to develop your startup, why you chose the methods, and why startups use them in general.
2. Customer insights: What you learned from customer interactions, and how it validated or changed your idea.
3. Reflection: What worked (for you and the team), what didn’t, and specifically what you’d do differently next time.
4. Course readings: Discuss at least four course readings and connect them to your own experience. Name-dropping doesn’t count.
5. Outside sources: At least two sources on innovation or entrepreneurship from outside the course.
6. Appendix: Your team’s interview log and a record of your MVP tests. The appendix is shared by the team.

The paper must be 'visual', easy to overview, and engaging to read: Include illustrations, diagrams, photos, etc., and use headlines and sub-headlines to structure the content.

Pre-course survey (individual, mandatory, not graded)

Academic Regulations  

Please make sure to read the Academic Regulations on the DIS website. There you will find regulations on: 

• Course Enrollment and Grading  
• Academic Expectations and Honor Code 

DIS - Study Abroad in Scandinavia - www.DISabroad.org

Schedule: The schedule is subject to change if necessary with as much notice as possible.

Class Policy on Audio and Video Taping and Distribution: Any audio or video recordings produced during this class, as well as any recordings posted to online class sites such as Canvas, may not be exchanged or distributed for commercial purposes, for compensation, for posting on social media sites, or be used for any other purpose other than for study by students enrolled in this class. In addition, the distribution or sharing of course materials (including instructor's slides) may constitute copyright infringement.