BU.152.710.xx- Entrepreneurial Ventures – Instructor’s Name Page 1 of 9
/ Entrepreneurial Ventures2 Credits
BU.152.710.xx
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Required Text and Learning Materials
Books:
John Mullins, 2013, The New Business Road Test: What Entrepreneurs and Executives Should Do Before Writing a Business Plan (4th Ed ISBN978-1-292-00374-0), Financial Times/ Prentice Hall: London, UK
Stephen Spinelli, Jr. and Robert Adams, 2012, New Venture Creation: Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century (9thEd ISBN 978-0-07-802910-3) McGraw Hill/Irwin New York, NY (Only Chapters 3, 9 and 14)
Instructors can put together the three chapters is 103 page PDF or print version by going to McGraw Hill Create at:
Students who are pursuing an entrepreneurial venture may find it worthwhile to buy the entire New Venture Creation text because it is an excellent reference document.
Required Readings Available from the Library Data Base
Title: Business Model Analysis for Entrepreneurs
product number: 9-812-096
Thomas Eisenmann
Title: Analyzing New Venture Opportunities
product number:9-809-163
Michael J. Roberts
Title: Business Model Analysis for Entrepreneurs
product number: 9-812-096
Thomas Eisenmann
Title: Analyzing New Venture Opportunities
product number:9-809-163
Michael J. Roberts
Title: Note on the Structural Analysis of Industries
product number: 376054-PDF-ENG
Michael E. Porter
Title: Assembling the Startup Team
product number: 9-812-122
Noam Wasserman
Title: Financing New Ventures
product number: 9-811-093
William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda
Title: Financing New Ventures
product number: 9-811-093
William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda
Title: How Venture Capitalists Evaluate Potential Venture Opportunities
product number: 9-805-019
Michael J. Roberts and Lauren Barley.
Title: What Really Works
product number: HBR Reprint: R3070C
Nitin Nohria, William Joyce and Bruce Roberson
Harvard Business School Cases Used in the Course
Title: Howard Schultz and Starbucks Coffee Company
product number 9-801-361
Nancy F.Koehn
Title: Zip Car: Refining the Business Model
product number: 9-803-096
Myra Hart, Michael J. Roberts and Julia D. Stevens
Title: Lion Nathan and the Chinese Beer Industry
product number: SM47-PDF-ENG
Joel Podolny, John Roberts, Andris Berzins
Title: Negotiating Equity Splits at UpDown
product number: 9-809-020
Noam Wasserman and Deepak Malhotra
Title: Nantucket Nectars: The Exit
product number: 9-810-041
Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman and Noam Wasserman.
Title: Pandora Radio: Fire Unprofitable Customers
product number:9-610-077
Willy Shih
Halle Tecco
To instructors: It is strongly recommended that a course pack be put together for the course at the Harvard Publishing website: The cost is around $25 for the 6 cases.
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 because we depend on your feedback to help us improve so you and your colleagues will benefit. Information on how to complete the evaluation will be provided towards 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 Carey Disability Services Office at time of admission and allow least four weeks prior to the beginning of the first class meeting. Students should contact Rachel Pickett in the Disability Services office by phone at 410-234-9243, by fax at 443-529-1552, or email: .
Important Academic Policies and Services
- Honor Code
- Statement of Diversity and Inclusion
- Student Success Center
- Inclement Weather Policy
Students are strongly encouraged to consult the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Student Handbook and Academic Catalog and the School website for detailed information regarding the above items.
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.
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.
Prerequisite(s): None
Student Learning Objectives for This Course
All Carey graduates are expected to demonstrate competence on four Learning Goals, operationalized in eight Learning Objectives. These learning goals and objectives are supported by the courses Carey offers. For a complete list of Carey learning goals and objectives, please refer to the website (
The learning objectives for this course are:
- You should be familiar with the ideation process and be able to come up with ideas for products and services.
- You should be able to assess ideas to determine their economic viability.
- You should 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.
- You should 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.
- You should 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.
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. Two classes, both excused and unexcused, may be missed without penalty. Beyond those two absences, your participation grade will be dropped ten points 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.
Assignments
Submission 1: Market and Industry Analysis, Macro Level
Submit a few PowerPoint Slides designed to be integrated into the feasibility study you will submit at the end of term, keeping in mind both the overall length requirements for that presentation and the principles of effective presentations. You may, of course, revise these slides as your research progresses.
These slides should present a concise analysis of your market and industry at the macro level, using secondary data you have collected. Your secondary data and their sources, properly cited, should be provided in the notes section of each slide to which the data pertain. Use appropriate readings for this course and other prior coursework as the analytical foundation for doing so. This submission should draw clear conclusions about the attractiveness of both your market and your industry at the macro level.
Submission 2: Primary Research Plan
Submit a detailed plan for conducting primary research to gather the necessary data to complete your market feasibility study. It is presumed that your data will not be statistically valid but rather identify positive or negative data about your plan. You do not need to draft any portion of the feasibility study at this time, since the primary research has not yet been conducted.
Your research plan needs to do needs to do four things:
- Precisely spell out the research objectives the research is intended to meet.
- Design the research to get you there. Submit guides for focus group sessions or in-depth interviews, drafts of questionnaires, plans for how you will conduct observational research, etc. Identify your methods, your sample, and any statistics (means, etc.), if any, you will employ. It is expected that each member of the team would collect data from surveys or interviews from at least 5-10 people.
- The expectation is that, for most of you, qualitative research (rather than large scale quantitative surveys) will comprise most or all of the research you will conduct. For those investigating opportunities that serve consumer markets, surveys may be appropriate.
- Show very precisely how the combination of your secondary research (already more or less complete) and your planned primary research will lead to your estimate of target market size and your sales forecast for years one to three. Precisely spell out the math that will do this, connecting it to specific secondary data or specific answers to questions or observations you expect to be gleaned from your primary data.
Also, please provide the planned format for one or more appendices to your final feasibility study that will summarize the results of any primary research you plan to conduct:
- For qualitative research: Indicate headings to be used to summarize the results of your interviews, focus groups, etc.
- For quantitative research: Indicate a format for showing mean answers to each survey question, cross-tabs or other analyses, etc.
These appendices will bolster the credibility of your primary research findings, and thereby bolster the credibility of your feasibility study as a whole.
Our objective here is to help you overcome the stumbling blocks others have typically encountered in doing the research for feasibility studies. We’ll give you prompt feedback to help ensure that your primary research turns out to be useful to you. Clear and careful thinking up front will save you time and trouble later, and will go a long way toward ensuring a solid project. Two to four pages plus drafts of your research instrument(s) should suffice.
Feasibility Study
Your feasibility study should be prepared, in teams of 3-5 students, according to the outline in The New Business Road Test (see box 10.1 on page 219-220) . It should be single-spaced in 12 point font and not exceed ten letter-sized pages, (exhibits, tables and references are not included in the page limit). It should clearly demonstrate why your idea as proposed at the outset of the course or as reshaped thereafter is or is not feasible. Either outcome is acceptable; however arguing that your idea is feasible (or not) when your evidence suggests otherwise will be result in a lower grade. Each team will receive a team grade for the study but each student’s grade will be adjusted up or down based on peer evaluations using the Carey Peer Evaluation Rubric.
Your team will also deliver a 10-minute final presentation of the Feasibility Study at our last class session. Your team will respond to questions from students and the instructor for 5-10 minutes. Each student will be asked to confidentially evaluate all the other presentations and the scores provided by your peers will be considered in determining the team grade.
Honor Code Statement
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.
Students are not allowed to use any electronic devices during in-class tests. Calculators will be provided if the instructor requires them for test taking. Students must seek permission from the instructor to leave the classroom during an in-class test. Test scripts must not be removed from the classroom during the test.
Evaluation and Grading
Class Participation
The ability to “think on your feet” and succinctly articulate your point of view about an entrepreneurial decision to be made is critical to entrepreneurs and, indeed, to any general manager. Our classroom will provide a safe place for you to develop and hone these skills. For some of our sessions, you are asked to prepare one or more transparencies for possible presentation to the class as part of our discussion.
If you are by nature a quiet person, please come talk to us and we’ll help bring you into our class discussions. Please note that the quality of what you contribute to these discussions (whether a thoughtful question, some astute analysis, or some other meaningful contribution) will count far more than the quantity of your remarks.
Assignment / Learning Outcome / WeightAttendance, participation in class discussion / 1, 4 / 30%**
Submission 1 / 1, 2 / 10%
Submission 2 / 1, 2, 3, 4 / 10%
Feasibility study / 1, 2, 3, 4, / 35%
Final Oral presentation / 4 / 15%
Important Notes about Grading Policy
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 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.
Session 1Idea Generation
Opportunities constitute the heart of successful entrepreneurship. As Bill Egan, a long-time venture capitalist says, “The lesson I have learned from the recent mania is that you may have capital and an experienced management team, but if you are fundamentally in a lousy business, you won’t get the kind of results you would in a good business. All businesses aren’t created equal.”
Where do ideas come from? Today we will examine the way the human brain organizes itself to form new ideas, explore for ourselves how this can work with us and try to understand the difference between mere ideas and genuine opportunities, from both the entrepreneur’s and investor's perspectives, and we’ll explore the seven domains that characterise successful ones. As you will see in this session, assessing opportunities draws heavily on some of your core coursework already completed – marketing and strategy in particular.
For session 2, you will prepare one venture idea for a 120-second presentation to the class. These presentations should be verbal, noPowerPoint slidesor other audio-visual aids.
Today’s Reading: / Mullins, The New Business Road Test, Chapter 1, “My Opportunity: Why Will or Won’t This Work?”Mullins, The New Business Road Test, Chapter 10, “What to do before you launch your lean start up.
Spinelli/Adams, New Venture Creationfor the 21st Century, Chapter 3,“The Entrepreneurial Process”
Session 2 Assessing Opportunities
Today, we will hear a120-second presentationswith no audio visual aids from each student. After the presentations there will be a discussion to determine which presentations are of interest to other students. Ideas which can attract 3-5 class members willbecome the basis for forming venture teams. During the class each student will select the team they want to be on based on the ideas that are voted by the class as the most viable for a project. Each team will have their first team meeting during the class so that work can begin work on submission one due before session 4.
Case: / Howard Schultz and the Starbucks Coffee CompanyCase Preparation / In the early 1980’s, how did Howard Schultz view the possibilities for the fledging coffee market? What were the most important factors in shaping his perspective?Starbucks grew very quickly under Schultz’s leadership what were the critical drivers of its success? What is the source of Starbucks’ competitive advantage? Is it sustainable? What should the company do next to enhance its position in the market?
Today’s Reading: / Mullins, The New Business Road Test, Chapter 6, “What Drives Your Entrepreneurial Dream?”
Michael J. Roberts “Analyzing New Venture Opportunities.
Session 3Identifying your Entrepreneurial Mission