Introduction to the Course - VIDEO - MODULE 1

Hi. CAIG Center for Entrepreneurship will be teaching our course in Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies, your first step in entrepreneurship. Our approach for developing innovative ideas for new companies is threefold. First, we'll explore how to identify and develop great ideas into great companies.

Next, we'll examine how to identify opportunities that are based on real and true customer needs.

And then we'll discuss methods for developing solid business models for the creation of successful and sustainable companies.

Our course is the first in the new entrepreneurship specialization sequence by CAIG Center for Entrepreneurship.

So, with our course, we are going to focus on helping students generate an innovative new venture concept or enhance their existing concept.

Our follow on courses in innovation and new venture financing set the foundation for building a comprehensive, customer-validated business model. Our final course, the entrepreneurship capstone, is geared towards taking the prior work and putting it into practice. Helping students create an investor pitch, and presenting a platform for them to complete for prizes and awards, and also to get feedback from experts and investors.

For our capstone course, we wanted to give you a bit of a preview. In part one, we're going to be developing a business model that will be examining value propositions and customer segments. And again, putting into practice many of the things that have been examined in the prior courses. We'll then talk about problems solution third, and MVPs, and it culminates in a real pitch that is a combination of a written analysis as well as a video of year pitch. And we're partnering with some of the leading entrepreneurs and accelerators in the US, and investors to give you feedback on that.

So with our course, on developing innovative ideas for new companies, we're going to focus on the opportunity analysis canvas. So we're going to be testing elements like entrepreneurial mindset, motivation and behaviors. We'll talk about how to analyze industries and markets, what it takes to be successful as you compete against current and expected competitors. Then we'll culminate with looking at value innovation and opportunity identification. So, this is the landscape of our focus in this first course.

So where does this fit? Where does this opportunity analysis canvas fit? Well. you've likely heard of business plans, and you may have heard of the business model canvas but we begin at the front end of that. So it's in the front end of looking for a new venture that we're going to focus our time on. The subsequent courses are going to dive deeper into the business model canvas and the business plans.

Our recommended book for the course is the Opportunity Analysis Canvas, and this serves as our guide for the course. It provides some added insights and backgrounds, and tools beyond video lectures. And is available online as an ebook.

So in summary, our courses help students explore how to identify and develop great ideas into great companies. We've examined how to identify opportunities based on real and true customer needs. And we've helped our students understand the methods for developing solid business model for the creation of successful and sustainable companies.