BU.152.710.XX– Entrepreneurial Ventures – Instructor Name – Page 1 of 7

/ Entrepreneurial Ventures
2 Credits
BU.152.710.XX
[NOTE: Each section must have a separate syllabus.]
[Day &Time / ex: Monday, 6pm-9pm]
[Start & End Date / ex: 3/24/15-5/12/15]
[Semester / ex: Fall 2016]
[Location / ex: Washington, DC]

Instructor

[Full Name]

Contact Information

[Phone Number, (###) ###-####]

[Email Address]

Office Hours

[Day(s)/Times]

Required Texts Learning Materials

There are required reading and some optional material. So read the lists and instructions carefully.

Harvard Business School Cases Used in the Course

Title: Sirtris Pharmaceuticals

Product number 808112-PDF-ENG

Stuart & Kiron.

Title: Zip Car: Refining the Business Model

Product number: 9-803-096

Myra Hart, Michael J. Roberts and Julia D. Stevens

Title: Cork'd: Building a Social Network for Wine Lovers

Product number: 911-026

Coles, Peter.

Harvard Business School Articles Used in the Course

  1. Stevenson & Spence (2007). Identifying and Exploiting the Right Opportunity…for You. 808043-PDF-ENG
  2. Wasserman, Noam."Assembling the Startup Team."Harvard Business School Background Note 812-122, January 2012.
  3. Hamermesh, Marshall & Pirmohamed (2002). Note on Business Model Analysis for the Entrepreneur. 802048-PDF-ENG.
  4. Michael J. Roberts and Lauren Barley, 2004.Title: How Venture Capitalists Evaluate Potential Venture Opportunities. 9-805-019
  5. Stevenson & Roberts (2002). New Venture Financing. 802131-PDF-ENG.

Required Readings Available from the Library Database

  1. George Day. Is It Real?Can We Win?Is It Worth Doing?Harvard Business Review. December 2007.
  2. Michael Porter. The five competitive forces that shape strategy. Harvard Business Review. Jan 2008.
  3. Elsbach, K.D. 2003. How to pitch a brilliant idea. Harvard Business Review. #R0309J
  4. Sahlman (1997). How to Write a Great Business Plan, Harvard Business Review. #97409.

Supplementary (optional) materials:

Kuratko, F.D. “Entrepreneurship: Theory, Process and Practice”,9th Edition, ISBN: 978-1285051758. Cengage Learning.

Course Description

This course focuses on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that enable entrepreneurs to pursue opportunities in business development. Students form teams to experience each step of the entrepreneurial process. The end result is an opportunity assessment of a business idea. Emphasis is placed on a hands-on approach with learning supplemented by cases appropriate to each phase of the course. Entrepreneurs and subject experts expose students to real entrepreneurial operations and businesses, such as incubator and venture capital firms, via consultations and presentations.

Prerequisite(s)None

Course Overview

Entrepreneurial Ventures provides students with an experiential and in-depth examination of the challenges involved in identifying and assessing an opportunity for an entrepreneurial venture, whether in business-to-business or business-to-consumer settings. By entrepreneurial, we refer to those ventures that are opportunity focused, whether their setting is a start-up, a small early-stage firm, a social enterprise, or a larger well-established company. The course’s focus on the entrepreneurial domain complements other courses in the MBA whose principal foci deal with the analytical and administrative domains of managerial behavior. The course also serves to apply and bring together, in an entrepreneurial context, tools and frameworks introduced in other core courses.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, students will: be able to:

  1. Be familiar with the ideation process and be able to come up with ideas for products and services.
  2. Be able to assess ideas to determine their economic viability.
  3. Be able to understand the different ways entrepreneurs can finance their venture. You should be able to do a market analysis of the potential demand for your product/service idea.
  4. Be able to succinctly and convincingly convey your idea and the opportunity to a potential investor, business partner, or employee both orally and in writing.
  5. Be able to understand the challenges that an entrepreneur faces in starting a business and forming a team and gain insights into whether this is something you may want to pursue one day.

To view the complete list of Carey Business School’s general learning goals and objectives, visit the Teaching & Learning@Carey website.

Attendance Policy

Attendance and participation are part of your course grade. Full attendance and active participation are required for you to succeed in this course. Oneclass, both excused and unexcused, may be missed without penalty. Beyond this one absence, participation grades will be deducted of your participation grades for each absence. Six absences, whether excused or not, result in a failing grade for the course. For an absence to be excused, you must have contacted the instructor prior to the class meeting, and you must provide a valid, legitimate, substantiated excuse at the next class session.

Class Participation

Students will be evaluated after each class on their contributions to discussions. Contributions are defined as: observations that advance the discussion or change the direction of the class discussion, insightful commentaries that raise learning points, probing questions that challenge the extant discussion and yield new directions, and analyses that clarify and amplify case facts. Class attendance is a pre-requisite for class contribution; therefore, students will earn a 0 on days they do not attend class. First 6 classes are worth 1 point and last two are worth two points. If you miss one class among the last two classes and its your first absence, then the class 6 will be worth 2 points and missed class will be worth 1 point. A minimal grade is assigned for attendance without active participation.

Class contribution will be graded 0-5 according to the following subjective criteria:

5 = able to answer or ask questions with good examples from the readings and makes several excellent points that reveals deep thought about the issue(s), and understanding of the readings and cases. Raises the level of discourse. This score is rare.

4 = raises a number of good points from the cases and readings, less inspired than a 5, but reveals a clear understanding of the material, with the ability to apply it.

3 = raises one or two good points, and shows a rudimentary grasp of the readings and cases. Essentially, attempts to draw some linkage with the concepts used in the class.

2 = makes one or two points but does not attempt to apply what is learned in the readings or lectures, i.e., superficial common sense-type answers to questions that required more insight.

1 = shows up for class but does not participate

0 = did not attend class

Final Project: Entrepreneurial Venture

As a part of class project, you will be generating ideas, forming teams and operating an entrepreneurial venture. Any additional money generated by this class will be donated to a charitable organization.

  1. Forming Teams (Session 1): Forming a team is more than just putting people together who like each other but ensuring you have the competencies to make your venture successful. Often new ventures award stock to founders who end up making insubstantial contributions to the eventual success of the company so it is important to be careful in making equity splits.

Each student will give a max 60-second introduction with no audio visual aids. During the class each student will select the team they want to be in. Each team will have their first team meeting during the class so that work can begin work on idea pitches due in the next session.

  1. Pitching Idea (Session 2): Each team will have 5 minutes to pitch their ideas to the class and 5 minutes to answer questions by the audience. After all the presentations, each student will fill an online survey rating the ideas of all teams except their own. These ratings will be used to evaluate and grade ideas as well as to determine seed funding.
  2. Collecting seed fund envelope (Session 3): Each team will collect their envelope containing the seed fund from the instructor.
  3. Submitting the final earnings in a envelope (Session 7): Please submit all your earnings in an envelope. Include receipts or evidence of making sales, receipts for costs incurred or investments made by team. Your investments (costs incurred) will be returned to you in session 8. The final revenue (minus the costs) will be donated to a charitable organization.
  4. Final presentation (Session 8): Each team will make a 10 minute presentation followed by 5 minutes to answer questions from the audience. Submit the presentation and business plan on blackboard.

Ethical Guidelines for the Entrepreneurial Project

Entrepreneurs are managing teams while trying to navigate a competitive market to establish their product. In the advent of social media, they are able to get the information faster to their consumers. However, this also raises the bar for ethical behaviour on part of these start-ups. A reputation that took years to build could be demolished within a few hours. Hence, following a code of ethics related to social responsibility is of paramount importance. In that light, we will have few simple guidelines to navigate the class project. Please read the ethical guidelines and sign it before handing it back to the instructor. In sum, we live in an era where even startups are bound by ethical and social responsibility. Hence, we need to ensure that we maintain a few ethical guidelines. Violation of these codes will lead to an automatic zero in all the team assignments. Here are three simple guidelines to follow for your class project.

  • No illegal activities associated with operating the entrepreneurial business.
  • No sales to family members
  • Customers must have the option to unsubscribe if you choose to market through any electronic media or through telephone.

Assignments & Rubrics

All assignments have to submit on Blackboard, unless explicitly mentioned. Students are responsible to ensure that the cases are uploaded on to blackboard before deadline for the assignments to be graded. No exceptions will be made and missing a deadline will lead to a score of zero.

Assignment / Learning Objective / Weight
Attendance, participation in class discussion (Individual) / 1, 4 / 10%
Cases analyses (3*15%) (Individual) / 2,3,4 / 45%
Idea Pitches (Team) / 1,2 / 10%
Performance (Team) / 1,2,3,4,5 / 5%
Final Oral presentation (Team) / 1,2,3,4,5 / 10%
Business Plan (Team) / 1,2,3,4,5 / 20%
Total / 100%

Case Analyses (Individual)

Entrepreneurial thinking and analysis are best learned through practice. The cases we will study concern real-world situations related to technology entrepreneurship. These cases are designed to provide you with information on real-life problems, and case analysis is useful as a simulation of actual events. These integrative cases provide an opportunity to both apply the concepts that we discuss in class as well as to further develop our ability to think about entrepreneurship. The questions will be uploaded as a word document on Blackboard.

Criteria used for the evaluation of case analyses:

The objective of the analysis is to respond to the case questions in a logical and structured manner. All arguments should be logically sound and supported by evidence from the case whenever possible. The typical length should be 1000-1500 words. Case analysis should not only repeat facts from the case without your analysis! Respond to the specific case questions when analyzing each case!

The case analysis will be graded based on the following criteria:

Problem statement:Did you define the scope of the problem? What are the different aspects of this problem? What is the relevant information from the case?

Analysis: Does you analysis remain focused on addressing the question raised? Did you indicate the key factors and mechanisms that are important for answering your question? You may also discuss different perspectives and approaches to the problem.

Recommendations: Did you suggest recommendations that follow logically from analysis? Be sure to discuss implementation issues.

Evaluation of Final Class Project (Team)

The final project is a team assignment and will be evaluated based on the rubric below. However, the final grades for individuals will be curved based on peer evaluation. Please make sure that you contribute throughout to the project and work with your teammates to successfully deliver the final class project.

There are four key deliverables for this section:

  1. Idea Pitch (Class 2): 5-minute pitch (10%)
  • The class will evaluate each team’s idea. The evaluation will be done through an online survey. This will also determine your seed funding that will be given to you in class 3.
  • The pitch should typically contains information about:
  • What problem are you solving?
  • Who are these individuals that benefit (customer)?
  • What is the product?
  • What is the competition?
  • How you are going to make money?
  • What resources do investor/customer have that you want?
  • Howe do you create value that you capture?
  1. Performance (Class 7): (5%)
  • Return the envelope with receipts of sale or proof of sale along with the earnings
  • Keep detailed receipt of your investments if any. If you are able to earn back your investment, it will be returned to you.
  • Earning will be calculated as final revenue after deducting the seed fund and other investments.
  • Evaluation criteria: Highest earner receives 100% of the grade. For other teams, their earnings will be calculated as percentage of the highest earning team. This percentage earning will be their grade for the total points. For example, if your percentage earning is 80%, then your grade is 4 points.
  1. Business plan evaluation criteria (Class 8):
  • Executive summary(2%)
  • Concept (value proposition/ competitive advantage)(4%)
  • Industry/product/market analysis(4%)
  • Implementation analysis (marketing, operations, risks and team)(4%)
  • Financial analysis(5%)
  • Conclusion (1%)
  1. Evaluation criteria for the presentation are the following(Class 8):
  • Substance of presentation(4%)
  • Covered topic well(2%)
  • Clarity and organization and time(2%)
  • Persuasiveness and style(1%)
  • Ability to answer questions, think on feet(1%)

The Group Process

First and foremost, take your role within the team seriously. You should aim to integrate the various viewpoints and simultaneously make the best possible use of the different analytical skills of the group members. A creative group process builds upon resolving diverse views in arriving at a synthesized whole. One method for achieving this result is to first have each group member work individually, then meet as a group and verbally decide on the group's collective judgments. You should decide on a specific group process for drafting, writing, and editing the final document. An important part of this process may involve giving one or two group members the authority to edit and pull the final document together, in the interests of generating a cohesive document.

Grading

The grade of A is reserved for those who demonstrate extraordinarily excellent performance. The grade of A- is awarded only for excellent performance. The grade for good performance in this course is a B+/B. The grades of D+, D, and D- are not awarded at the graduate level.
Please refer to the Carey Business School’s Student Handbook for grade appeal information.

Tentative Course Calendar*
*The instructors reserve the right to alter course content and/or adjust the pace to accommodate class progress. Students are responsible for keeping up with all adjustments to the course calendar.

Class # / Topic / Reading / In Class Activity / Hand- in Assignment
(Before class)
1 / Entrepreneurship, and Idea Generation / Identifying and Exploiting the Right Opportunity / Forming Teams (Description in Final Project)
2 / Evaluating Opportunities / Is it real? Can we win? Is it worth doing?
How to pitch a brilliant idea / Idea Pitches(Description in Final Project) / Sirtris Pharmaceuticals HBS Case (Only BB Submission)
3 / Business Plan / How to Write a Great Business Plan (POCD framework)
Note on the Business Model Analysis for the Entrepreneur. / Collect seed fund (Description in Final Project)
Work through a business plan template / Zipcar HBS Case (Only BB Submission)
4 / Founding team, and entrepreneurial Networks / Assembling the startup team / Cork’d HBS Case (Only BB Submission)
5 / Industry Analysis / The five competitive forces that shape strategy. / Industry Analysis of your business
6 / Funding / New Venture Financing
How Venture Capitalists Evaluate Potential Venture Opportunities / Updates: 120 sec presentation each team
7 / Wrap Up / A Note on Managing the Growing Venture. / Opportunity for teams to work on your business plan, and final presentation / Hand In the Envelope (In class, & Description in Final Project)
8 / Final Presentation / Presentations: 10 minutes each team, with 5 minutes of Q&A (Description in Final Project) / Final Presentation, and Business Plan (Only BB Submission)

Carey Business School

Policies and General Information

Blackboard Site

A Blackboard course site is set up for this course. Each student is expected to check the site throughout the semester as Blackboard will be the primary venue for outside classroom communications between the instructors and the students. Students can access the course site at Support for Blackboard is available at 1-866-669-6138.

Course Evaluation

As a research and learning community, the Carey Business School is committed to continuous improvement. The faculty strongly encourages students to provide complete and honest feedback for this course. Please take this activity seriously; we depend on your feedback to help us improve. Information on how to complete the evaluation will be provided toward the end of the course.

Disability Services

Johns Hopkins University and the Carey Business School are committed to making all academic programs, support services, and facilities accessible. To determine eligibility for accommodations, please contact the Disability Services Office at time of admission and allow at least four weeks prior to the beginning of the first class meeting. Students should contact Priscilla Mint in the Disability Services Office by phone at 410-234-9243, by fax at 443-529-1552, or by email.

Honor Code/Code of Conduct

All students are expected to view the Carey Business School Honor Code/Code of Conduct tutorial and submit their pledge online.Students who fail to complete and submit the pledge will have a registrar’s hold on their account. Please contact the student services office via email if you have any questions.