Entrepreneurship is one of the most rewarding and potentially lucrative career choices. Given the numerous business transitions driven by AI, now is one of the most opportune times to be an entrepreneur. While the most rewarding path is to create a new company that brings your unique business vision to life, other approaches include building a business within a corporate setting (intrapreneuring), assuming the leadership of your family’s business (inheriting), or purchasing someone else’s business (acquiring). At the core of any great entrepreneurial offering is a viable solution and business model that truly addresses customers’ needs or fulfills an unmet desire. While business ideas are “a dime a dozen,” defining a viable business model for the right idea is invaluable yet very difficult. In all forms of entrepreneurship, pursuing the wrong ideas or models wastes precious time, resources, and energy.
Entrepreneurial Discovery is the class that builds extensively on Professor Tebbe’s 40+ years of technology entrepreneurial experience in combination with insights from past and current leaders to help you experience the RIPPLE methodology, a proven collection of approaches that serves as the foundation for building a viable business. It is not expected that you and your team will collectively build your dream startup in nine weeks (although it has happened many times before), but rather you actively encounter the processes that allow you to apply these methods to your next (or first) company when you will have more time and focus on your business. This course gives impassioned innovators the tools to identify and iteratively refine the right business idea into a viable business model that is relevant, differentiated, and sustainable.
The class goal is to build the foundation for a viable business. Using customer-centric and evidence-based processes, students will work in teams to explore a real-world foundational opportunity. Each team will choose its problem space, conduct research, perform user-centered analysis and studies, and derive insights from customer interactions. Teams will then use stakeholder feedback to conceptualize and refine multiple ways to address the needs in their respective problem area. Leveraging these insights, teams will quickly refine the problem and iterate on potential solutions. They will then commit to one solution and develop an initial business model to build the business around it. They will then identify the business team, funding, and timing needs and summarize them in core messaging materials. The course’s deliverables allow each team to share a complete overview of their solution, using both internally and externally focused documents that explain their clarified and refined business solution (with a viable business model). However, this class does not assess the quality of your final business; it assesses the quality of your journey to build that foundation, which each team will present during the closing class.
Let’s be clear: This is not a passive class! As entrepreneur-turned-educator and author Steve Blank states, “To turn hypotheses into facts, founders need to get out of the building and test them in front of customers.” As such, our students will attend class sessions to explore key elements of this process, including problem framing, “needs-finding” research techniques, opportunity identification, prototyping, and customer development. However, students are expected to spend time outside the classroom conducting research, meeting with potential stakeholders, and actively exploring alternatives as they refine their business idea. This class is a lab because it will require you to constructively identify problems or opportunities worth solving, frame your assumptions, refine your hypothesis with insights from potential stakeholders, and reframe the opportunity as if you were in a science class. Just as successful entrepreneurs learn from the industry, customers, and stakeholders while defining and running their business, you will do the same in this class!
This class will include a combination of lectures, team presentations, external speakers, and in-class discussions. Class time will be highly interactive with students expected to actively participate by sharing insights and solutions. Students may participate only in their registered section. As members of a lab class, students will work in student-only teams to conduct interviews, perform observations, and work closely with industry experts and stakeholders as well as their other core team members. Group work is essential to the design process and will be extensive in this course. Participants should expect to meet with their assigned group multiple times outside of the classroom and should anticipate investing a minimum of seven hours per week.
By the end of the course, you will have acquired reusable business innovation skills and tools to:
- discover problem areas worth exploring,
- discriminate between strong and weak business ideas,
- refine possible business ideas by iteratively exploring solutions,
- enhance these ideas with customer and market feedback,
- outline a viable business model on a Business Model Canvas,
- rapidly test, iterate and execute on your defined business model, and
- effectively communicate the needs for growing your business.
Due to the group nature of this course, you will only be able to drop the class before the first class begins.
As expressed by one of the former students in feedback forms, "I am super glad that I took Entrepreneurial Discovery and would recommend it to first year students looking for an introduction to the entrepreneurial process. Leveraging Prof Tebbe’s experience and proven insights, we gained a framework that gave me clarity on how to identify a real problem that’s worth pursuing and then how to build the business core to make it happen."
