Course Syllabus

Innovation & Entrepreneurship in Europe

Course description

📸  Google Photos for our class

Get ready to innovate, collaborate, and create something remarkable. Welcome to the Entrepreneurship Incubator! 

This course works like a startup incubator where you form teams and create startups. Teamwork is essential and there is a lot!

You learn how to think like an innovator and use frameworks like Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas, Design Thinking, Value Proposition Design, and Customer Journey Mapping. You also get hands-on experience in solving real-world problems and receive guidance from experienced mentors. Plus, you get to visit some amazing startup founders in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany and learn directly from their stories.

To start, you identify a problem based on customer needs. You then develop hypotheses about customers and solutions and validate them through surveys, interviews, explainer videos, websites, or other representations of your idea.

To conclude, you pitch your startup to real investors and serial entrepreneurs who give you candid, constructive feedback. They will treat you not as students but as future startup founders from an incubator program.

We meet for three hours a week in class. You also need to spend six hours a week outside of class, most of it with your team which requires careful planning!

This course is not for you if you can not commit to that.

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
• Designing simple, professional slides, communicating clearly, and presenting effectively in an investor pitch
• Understanding that failure is inevitable in 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 communities in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany.

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)
• 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, 2014
• Constable, Giff: Talking To Humans
• Fitzpatrick, Rob: The Mom Test

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 three-day study tour to Sweden and Denmark and 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 (you will meet passionate founders who will inspire and/or shock you).

Long Study Tour: Berlin

The objectives of the study tour to Berlin are:

• Meeting with startups/scaleups and entrepreneurship communities that will share their experiences
• Presenting your team's business ideas to a venture capital company for constructive feedback
• PS: The 2023 Startup Ecosystem report ranks Berlin 2nd and Stockholm 4th in Europe!

Grading

Grading (expanded)

This class is based on identifying a problem, coming up with solutions, and turning that into a business. You must, therefore, have a strong drive to learn by doing. 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.

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. 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
• Preparing AS A TEAM for every class and planning your time abroad AS A TEAM to meet the expected workload
• Providing and receiving feedback from your peers and others during the course
• Participating actively in class activities
• Actively seeking out startup events, 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.

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 to generate feedback via MVPs, the better. Experimentation and boldness are required.

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 must be delivered in max. 3 min. You will be judged on the content and clarity 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. Explain how and why startups use the methods you have used
2. Key insights from your customer interactions that helped validate and develop your idea
3. A reflection about which steps/methods in the process worked well for you (and your team) and which could be improved next time... and how
4. Include meaningful references to the course readings and discuss these
5. Relevant knowledge on innovation and entrepreneurship from other sources outside of the class and its readings
6. 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 have done with your MVPs

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, distribution or sharing of course materials (including instructor PowerPoint slides) may constitute copyright infringement.