MGT 387
What
MGT 387, "Creating, Discovering, Evaluating, and Pitching Entrepreneurial Opportunities." The main idea is to help students laser in on (1) the opportunity recognition process with help from human-centered design and various creativity techniques, (2) evaluate opportunities, (3) build value into your idea through validated learning, and pitch that idea throughout the course. "Your pitch is only as good as the value you've created in your startup."
I created this course and have taught it around 10 times. The last instance was for Spring 2020. Here I share the organization, topics, and activities I use(d) in this course.
entrepreneurs and opportunities
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Creativity Techniques
Presentation Slides: Creativity
Twenty-Two Creativity Techniques - "Let's find a problem...and Lotus Blossom Technique it" (said nearly nobody in history)
Tactics to Spark Creativity (WSJ.com, 4/2013; original article available at WSJ.com)
A Crash Course in Creative Breakthroughs (Fastcompany.com)
Human-centered design
Doc: Empathy on the Edge
Slides: Design Thinking: Lessons from IDEO and Stanford's d.school
Slides: More thoughts about ideas and human-centered design
Slides: Human-centered design: Inspiration (derived from creative commons license by IDEO)
Site: Radical Ideas for Reinventing College, From Stanford's D.School (with video by Sarah Stein Greenberg posted below)
Doc: An alternate opinion: The Problem with Design Thinking
Pitching
Slides: How to Pitch
Page: How to pitch video for your idea
Doc: How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert
Doc: Pay Attention: My personal notes from Chapter 17 of The Launch Pad, by Randall Stross, with elaborations. These are tips for pitching and presenting distilled from Stross’s excellent book about Y Combinator. Think about how to incorporate these insights into your pitches and your attitude toward how you communicate with people you want to win over. What will you do to make your audience “pay attention?”
Optional but helpful reading: Email response to a student who is nervous about videorecording a pitch
In-Class Activities
Real Escape Game (links to a google doc with brief YouTube video and questions about the "four constructs of entrepreneurship:" the entrepreneur, the opportunity, resources, and uncertainty.
Practice: Frame Your Design Challenge: Make the Tuscaloosa Bar Scene Safer and
You Try It! Frame Your Design Challenge for Tuscaloosa Bar Scene. Mostly relate-able to undergraduates. Some students remarkably do not go to bars.
Page: Know your audience - create a customer persona. Can be created by one person out of class or by a team in class.
Page: Know what your audience wants - create a value proposition canvas. Can be created by one person out of class or by a team in class.
Doc: Pitching Worksheet for Truck-Based Business. Do this in teams; forces students to confront problems that could be solved by a truck-based business. Takes advantage of the popularity of food trucks, but is food the only value proposition trucks can provide? Students open the google doc, make their own copy, and answer the questions in google docs or other word processor. One student from each team pitches the idea to the rest of the class. Open up or close this activity with this slide deck about a truck-based book store, which highlights the dimensions of the opportunity.