Course Syllabus

Innovation & Entrepreneurship in Europe

Course description

✏️  Blog for our class

📸  Google Photos for our class

Links to the Danish startup community: TheHub, Crunchbase (not Danish), Berlin tech ecosystem (not Danish)

This course runs like an incubator program. You work in teams (expect a substantial amount of group work!) on your own startup.

You learn the tools required to succeed as entrepreneurs... and apply those tools. You get hands-on experience tackling the challenges that entrepreneurs face and you receive advice from experienced mentors as well as inspiration from visits to startups. 

You assume an entrepreneurial and innovative mindset and use methods like Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas, Design Thinking, Value Proposition Design and Customer Journey Mapping.

Initially, you identify a problem in need of a solution by looking at customer needs. Through an intensive process, you build hypotheses about your customers and your solution. You validate these by doing interviews and creating explainer videos, websites or other representations of your hypotheses.

You work toward pitching your business idea to real investors and serial entrepreneurs who give you straight-up, constructive feedback. 

During the course, you meet with some of the main Danish, Swedish and German players in entrepreneurship including founders of leading startups.

Learning objectives

• Learning methods for identifying customer needs and continuously getting feedback on solutions
• Developing a Business Model for a startup venture
• Building Minimum Viable Products (= experiments) and testing them with customers
• Learning to design clean, professional slide decks, communicate clearly, and present effectively in an investor pitch
• Understanding that failure is inevitable in entrepreneurship and innovation… but also a source of learning
• Understanding the interplay between different actors on the entrepreneurial scene (entrepreneurs, science parks, universities, venture capitalists, incubators/accelerator programs)
• Actively engaging in the entrepreneurship and innovation communities in Denmark, Sweden and Berlin.
  
  

We have three hours a week of class time. 
The workload outside of class is six hours a week, most of it in your teams... which takes planning!

Faculty: Mikael Fuhr, mikael.fuhr@dis.dk

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 (primarily chapters 1-6 and 8) (To be picked up from the library during arrivals week)
• Osterwalder, Alexander, et.al.: Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers and Challengers, 2010 (To be picked up from the library during arrivals week)
• Osterwalder, Alexander, et.al.: Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want, 2010
• Constable, Giff: Talking To Humans 
• Cases and articles TBA
• Course blog for cases, comments and clips: http://entrepreneurshipinnovation.tumblr.com

Core course week

This week is entirely dedicated to the core course and all other electives will be put on hold. The purpose is to have an intense focus on the course through a 3-day study tour to Sweden and Denmark as well as workshops.

Objectives of the core course week:

• Building a strong bond and ease in sharing ideas for the student teams' startups.
• Inspiring the teams through interaction with key actors on the entrepreneurial scene.
• Getting exposed to Design Thinking to enhance innovation and creativity.

Long Study Tour: Berlin

The objectives of the study tour to Berlin are:

• Meeting with successful startups/scaleups and entrepreneurship communities that will share their experiences.
• Presenting the teams' business ideas to venture capital company for constructive feedback.
• PS: The 2022 Startup Ecosystem report ranks Sweden 2nd and Germany 3rd in Europe!

Grading

Grading (expanded)

This class is based on identifying a problem, coming up with solutions and turning that into an actual business. You must, therefore, have a strong drive to learn by doing. If you are used to ‘traditional’ lecture-based courses, this can be a challenge. Please do not select this course if you expect to study articles and take tests, expect the professor to lecture all the time, or if you 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 viable business. 

The class focuses on short lectures followed by multidisciplinary teamwork with close supervision. In this way, you learn to utilize existing and new knowledge in collaboration with students from various backgrounds.

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

Engagement (20% — indiv.): This class requires a high level of motivation and active participation in class, and during the study tours. Attendance is mandatory. To get a good engagement grade the following must be done:

• Collaborating well with your team and handling any team 'obstacles' in a professional manner
• Planning your time abroad AS A TEAM to meet the expected workload (=11 hours per week)
• Providing and receiving feedback from your peers and other parties that your meet during the course
• Participating actively in class activities
• Preparing properly for every class
• Actively seeking out startup events, participating in the local startup scene and sharing with the class
• Being willing to step out of your comfort zone, to dare and to try new approaches.

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

FORMAT: Written 1.000 words paper + Team presentation (featuring all team members)

This paper must elaborate on three topics:

Business Model Canvas: Explain the process and considerations of developing your Business Model Canvas (at its current stage).

• Focus on the process, describing primarily how 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, where you prepare your hypotheses of a Business Model and then take that hypothesis to potential customers for validation.

• Describe primarily how/which ways you interacted with customers (at your current stage) and secondarily what you learned from customers that significantly influenced or changed your business idea. Successful Customer Discovery does not imply that the customers necessarily agree with you. There is much value in learning what the customers do not want and making the appropriate adjustments.

Market Analysis: Having solid domain knowledge vastly improves a given venture’s chances of success. In this context, domain knowledge does not have to be extremely technical, but rather good and analytical knowledge of the market that you intend to go into. You are not required to display an absolute knowledge of the market since it is an early-stage paper. You are however required to show an understanding of the basic drivers of your particular market/industry. As the semester progresses this initial understanding will be strengthened as you learn more about the market and its related customer needs:

• What is the competitive landscape like?
• What are the trends that are changing the industry/market?
• What opportunities can you spot in this changing landscape?
• Give an approximation of the size of the opportunity, i.e. how large is the target market?

The paper must be visual and structured to be easy to overview: Include illustrations, diagrams, etc., and use headlines, sub-headlines, etc to structure and prioritize the content.

Minimum Viable Product Presentation (15% — team)

FORMAT: Slide deck + presentation:

• Give a quick update on your customer development process
• Explain your choices in connection with your MVP (how did you establish what was 'minimum'?) and the way you use it with customers to learn
• Demo a live MVP, e.g. explainer video, landing page, website, app dummy or a physical prototype (if applicable).

You will be graded on efforts to build something that can generate feedback from customers. Your demo in class is the first version... and it can be flawed. The more ways you can produce in order to generate feedback via MVPs, the better. Experimentation and boldness is highly encouraged and expected.

‘The MVP is the version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort’ (Eric Ries)

Investor Pitches (15% — team)

FORMAT: Slide deck + final pitch to a panel of professional entrepreneurs and investors. ‘Training’ pitches during the course may count towards this grade as well. The pitch should be delivered in max. 3 min. You will be judged on the content of the pitch and your presentation skills.

‘Journey’ and Reflection Paper (35% — indiv.)

FORMAT: Written 1.500-word paper (+10% extra is acceptable)

Describe (verbally and visually) the ‘journey‘ — step by step — that you have been through in the course and reflect on key moments. Think of this as if you were teaching what you have learned to a third person:

1. A description of the process you used in developing your startup
2. Key insights from your customer interactions that helped validate and tune your idea
3. A summary and reflection about which steps/methods of the entire process worked well for you (and your team) and which should be improved next time... and how. Discuss processes or methods (potentially even some not covered in this course that you have studied elsewhere).
4. Appendix: A log of conducted interviews (for your team). Starting the week after Core Course Week a quota of interviews — in-person or online — must be conducted every week. Also, include the tests you do with your MVPs.

The paper must be 'visual' and structured to be easy to overview and engaging to read: Include illustrations, diagrams, photos etc. and use headlines and sub-headlines to structure and prioritize 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, distribution or sharing of course materials (including instructor PowerPoint slides) may constitute copyright infringement.