Admission requirements
3rd year bachelor students
Description
‘Life's too short to build something nobody wants’ Ash Maurya
This course teaches you how to turn ideas, visions, broad and sweeping goals into a company. Using recent insights in entrepreneurial and innovation driven organisations, the course will guide you in developing an enterprise ‘the start-up way’.
Why ‘developing an enterprise’? We are in favour of learning by doing, so we want to make this course very practical: with a group you will generate a business model for an enterprise that you might actually want to establish in real life. Creating a real company is not mandatory within this course, but it has been known to happen.
Why ‘the start-up way’? The definitions of what a start-up is (there are many) often contain texts like ‘planning to grow fast’, ‘innovative products/services’, ‘disrupt a market’. You need not develop an innovative, disruptive start-up within this course, but we do want to use the start-up way of working as it allows for iteration, experimentation and fast learning. This is a very practical course with an emphasis on learning by doing. And the learning by doing is mostly done through group work.
The course will be of interest to those who are considering establishing their own enterprise and to those that want to know more about the start-up approach in general.
Topics covered
1. Introduction to entrepreneurship and start-ups
2. Identifying market opportunities
3. Value Proposition design
4. Business models and revenue models
5. Pitching
6. Validation
7. Financials
8. Funding
9. Demand generation
10. Selling.
Course objectives
After this course you will be able to:
apply contemporary theories in entrepreneurship and innovation
appraise and use tools that are used for the process of innovation
define market opportunities
study a target market and identify a need or problem
develop and improve a value proposition
create a business model
develop a go-to-market strategy and describe the challenges in going to market
pitch your ideas with confidence
make a judgment as whether you would like to become an entrepreneur
reflect on teamwork and team roles
appreciate the effort and dedication needed to make a business succeed.
Timetable
You will find the timetables for all courses and degree programmes of Leiden University in the tool MyTimetable (login). Any teaching activities that you have sucessfully registered for in MyStudyMap will automatically be displayed in MyTimeTable. Any timetables that you add manually, will be saved and automatically displayed the next time you sign in.
MyTimetable allows you to integrate your timetable with your calendar apps such as Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and other calendar apps on your smartphone. Any timetable changes will be automatically synced with your calendar. If you wish, you can also receive an email notification of the change. You can turn notifications on in ‘Settings’ (after login).
For more information, watch the video or go the the 'help-page' in MyTimetable. Please note: Joint Degree students Leiden/Delft have to merge their two different timetables into one. This video explains how to do this.
Mode of instruction
During the course you will be working as a founding team of a start-up enterprise on tasks like:
Researching and defining a market opportunity
Creating a value proposition
Creating a business model
Creating pitches
Validating your assumptions about all the above topics.
These tasks are continuous, require parallel processing, require allocating different tasks to different group members. This implies a high level of interaction and collaboration in the group. Groups can use video conferencing tools like Microsoft Teams to discuss assignments and create deliverables.
The groups will be populated at random when the course starts. Groups will consist of 4 to 6 students. This course is all about business and innovation. Groups are free to select any kind of market opportunity, to align with the topics of the minor we do however expect a strong relation between the business idea and science.
The course itself consists of:
Pre-recorded lectures
Group assignments: the results of the group assignments are incorporated by the group in an enterprise model and in pitches (short and focussed presentations)
Individual assignments
Interactive sessions. The interactive sessions are used to discuss pitches and provide feedback on pitches. Each group will submit one or more pitches during the course according to a schedule that will be published at the start of the course
A final ‘live’ event where groups will pitch their enterprise and receive feedback on both the pitch and their enterprise model.
This course uses pre-recorded lectures to allow us to make optimal use of the interactive sessions. Students will be informed how the interactive sessions will be run before the course starts. The sessions might be live, online, or a mixture of these approaches. As several sessions have a workshop character it will not be technically feasible to partake online.
Assessment method
Assignments on Brightspace contain explanations and specifications about the work that needs to be done by groups and students and about the deliverables that need to be submitted on Brightspace.
Rubrics on Brightspace define how each submission will be graded and are also used to provide students with feedback.
Students are graded on the following aspects:
Quality of feedback provided by each group to other groups (10 %)
Quality of pitches created by own group (20 % in total)
Quality of case study and case study presentation carried out by the group (15 %)
Quality of the created enterprise model with the own group (25 %)
Submitted Lessons Learned by each individual student (10 %)
Individual reflection paper, containing reflections on how to deal with the received feedback during the final event and discussing the potential success of the start-up, providing arguments for this from theory and from the course. (20 %).
Grading specifications:
Partial grades will be rounded off at two decimals and will be communicated through Brightspace
The final grade will be calculated using the non-rounded off partial grades and taking into account the weights of these partial grades
Your final calculated grade can be adjusted manually by the lecturer in the case of special circumstances.
There will be no final exam and resits are only possible for individual work.
Reading list
Christensen, Clayton (1997) The Innovator’s dilemma. HBR Press
Ries, Eric (2011) The Lean Startup. Crown Books
Osterwalder, Alex (2010), Business Model Generation. John Wiley Publishers
Osterwalder, Alex (2014), Value Proposition Design. John Wiley Publishers
Fitzpatrick, Rob (2014), The Mom Test
Keeley, Larry (2013) Ten Types of Innovation. John Wiley Publishers
This is just part of the literature that will be used during the course. This list contains the ‘real’ books. The other parts of the reading/viewing list consist of videos to watch and articles to read on the Internet. Links to these articles and videos will be provided through Brightspace.
Reading the real books is optional for the course, so this list is just to show you some of the ‘classics’.
Registration
Every student has to register for courses with the enrollment tool MyStudyMap. There are two registration periods per year: registration for the fall semester opens in July and registration for the spring semester opens in December. Please see this page for more information. Exemptions are minor students and fall semester for 1st year bachelor students: the student administration will enroll these groups for courses.
Please note that it is compulsory to both preregister and confirm your participation for every exam and retake. Not being registered for a course means that you are not allowed to participate in the final exam of the course. Confirming your exam participation is possible until ten days before the exam.
Extensive FAQ's on MyStudymap can be found here.
This course can only be followed as part of the SBI minor (15 or 30 ECTS).
Contact
Remarks
Students are responsible for enrolling/unenrolling themselves for (partial) exams/retakes.
Students fail the course if any of the partial components (except the exam) that make up the final mark of the course is assessed below 4.0.
Students fail the course if the grade for the (final) exam is assessed below 5.0.
Completing all graded assignments is mandatory for this course.
The grade for non-completed graded assignments will be 0.0, which means you will fail the course if you do not complete all graded assignments.
The final grade is expressed as a whole or half number between 1.0 and 10.0, including both limits. The result is not to be expressed as a number between 5.0 and 6.0.
If one of the components of the final mark constitutes a component that assesses attendance or class participation, students cannot take a retake for this component. Therefore, students fail the course if their mark for this component is less than 4.0.
Partial grades, inclusive the exam grade will not be rounded. If partial grades will be communicated, it is possible partial grades are rounded, but unrounded partial grades will be used in the calculation of the final grade. The final grade will be rounded at 0.5 (5.49 will rounded down to a 5 and a 5.5 will be rounded up to a 6.0).
It is not possible to do retakes for group assignments. Therefore, if students fail the group assignment component, they fail the course.
Students pass the course if the final mark is 6.0 or higher (5.49 will rounded down to a 5 and a 5.5 will be rounded up to a 6.0).
For courses, for which class participation is an assessment component, students may not be penalised for an absence if the student has a legitimate justification for this absence. The student must notify the program coordinator via email (info@sbb.leidenuniv.nl) of such an absence BEFORE the lecture, describing the reason for missing the lecture. If the student does not notify the program coordinator before the lecture, the student will be penalised. Students may be required to provide further documentation to substantiate their case, and class attendance requirements are only waived under exceptional circumstances such as illness.
Students who are entitled to more exam/retake time must report to info@sbb.leidenuniv.nl 10 days before the exam/retake takes place.