International Entrepreneurship – From idea to business idea

This course will give students the ability and some of the skills to detect business opportunities in daily life, focusing on customer needs, and generate unconventional ideas which can turn into innovative business opportunities.
The course will help future managers or entrepreneurs get an understanding of some of the fundamentals of innovation and new ventures development, focusing on combining creativity with a practical approach and business sense.

In our everyday life we are constantly facing problems, big and small, or situations that could improve or benefit from some kind of innovation. On the other hand, through anlaysis, knowledge and/or intuition, we often come up with ideas to faciltate change and improve and innovate. In most cases, we are not in a position to assess whether those ideas could become successful business.

This course will try to match the link between identification of problems, focused idea generation and development of business opportunities. Students will be guided through the process following the logic:

• Customer, Problem, Solution: the importance of identifying and following customer needs.
• Creativity, lateral thinking, brainstorming techniques to identify the best solution to those needs.
• Reality check: validating the idea
• Business modeling in an international, multicultural, volatile business environment to assess the business potential for value creation.
• How to create an “investor package”: what investors want to hear
• Principles of idea presentation and pitching: a good presentation makes a good business idea better

Lectures, cases, class debates and expert guest speakers.
Teamwork and group presentations.
Students will form groups and present a Business Idea at the end of the course. The process will begin by each group choosing one problem to solve from a selection of problems offered by the professor, and moving on towards a practical business solution to that problem.

• Serious Creativity, Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas – Edward De Bono
• Ingenious – Tina Seelig
• The Lean Start up – Eric Ries