Technology Entrepreneurship
Full course description
The course Technology Entrepreneurship aims to help you understand and master core entrepreneurial challenges of turning science into products and products into businesses. We will adopt a strongly entrepreneurial lens. Meaning that we will look at important technology commercialization activities through the eyes of a potential technology entrepreneur or investor.
Adopting the view of technology entrepreneurs means that market-related aspects of science commercialization move center stage. In that, one of the most important tasks entrepreneurs have to perform is to understand their full opportunity space, i.e. the range of potential opportunities and the conditions of value creation within those opportunities. Opportunity validation and development becomes the key focus, all the while paying attention to the challenges of developing the technology in parallel. If this process is mastered it can be a highly rewarding task—not only for individual inventors and their team, but also for stakeholders such as future employees, research and other value chain partners, the region, and the country.
The competencies you will acquire in this course will help you prepare for your own entrepreneurial journey. They will also be extremely valuable should you choose a career in managing technology at an established firm or within a public or private research lab. In particular university labs and corporate R&D department rely increasingly on professionals that help bridging the gap between science production (conference presentations, scientific publications, and patents) and commercial value creation (revenues, funding for scientific and applied research). In both settings efforts in research and development need to be legitimized and be able to answer to which extent they will ultimately result in economic performance—a core learning goal in this course.
Course objectives
Primary goal: To understand how science-based research and technological breakthroughs can be transformed into new business.
Secondary goals: [1] To develop a solid theoretical understanding of the process of market opportunity identification and evaluation in the context of new technologies. [2] To explore the frontier of current knowledge when it comes to creating value from technological inventions and managing early-stage commercialization processes. [3] To practically apply your knowledge on early stage commercialization efforts. [4] To channel back your practically acquired knowledge into theoretical conceptualizations of the entrepreneurial opportunity identification and evaluation process.
Prerequisites
The courses of the Entrepreneurship minor draw on the scholarly entrepreneurship literature. You do NOT need to have prior knowledge in the functional domains of business administration or small business management (e.g. strategy, marketing, accounting, HRM, finance, operations). However, we strongly encourage you to take the two introductory courses of the minor (Birthing new ventures & Mobilising resources [EBC2145; EBC2146]) BEFORE taking this course. Your command of English in speech and writing needs be adequate to actively prepare for, participate in, and contribute to the classes. Also, make sure you can commit sufficient time during this block to accommodate the work load.
Recommended reading
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