Launching Entreprenrl Ventures

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

LEV is a hands-on applied course for students who are ready to actively engage with a target market, either by founding their own venture, joining another student’s venture, or collaborating on a real-world industry project for a third-party provider you can be placed in touch with during the course. You will be interacting with your target customer by conducting primary and secondary market research, designing and testing minimum viable offerings, marketing your offerings to alpha and beta testers and even public launch users, developing a customer acquisition and retention strategy, bringing on and motivating team members, advisors, and partners, and preparing investor-ready presentation materials for fundraising and other promotional purposes. The experiential learning will include in-class activities and lectures, as well as access to EIRs, advisors, investors, incubators, lab members, event participants, and other resource providers who can provide real-time feedback as needed. Each team will be receiving several hundred dollars of funding to pursue their team venture. The deliverables will be weekly briefings in the form of status updates and reflections, culminating in a final presentation that provides opportunities to demonstrate written and verbal “storytelling with data” skills. All students are encouraged to expand their professional networks by connecting with each of the key contacts from the course on LinkedIn. Students can also receive LinkedIn recommendations for skillsets they successfully honed during this class. Students can also place skills from this class on their resumes as real work experiences they now have in their toolkits. LEV represents a terrific complement to my Foundations of Entrepreneurship "FOE" class, but that is not a prerequisite for the course.