Startup Entrepreneurship Specialization

How do you implement ideas?

This course provides practical proven tools for transforming an idea into a product or service that creates value for others. As students acquire these tools, they learn how to tell bad ideas from good, how to build a winning strategy, how to shape a unique value proposition, prepare a business plan, compare their innovation to existing solutions, build flexibility into their plan and determine when best to quit. As a vital part of the course students conduct on-site interviews with entrepreneurs who have launched startups, and are eager to share their valuable insights with them. Upon completing this course successfully, graduates will be able to: 1. Transform ideas into real products, services and processes, by validating the idea, testing it, and turning it into a growing, profitable and sustainable business. 2. Identify the major steps and requirements in order to estimate the potential of an innovative idea as the basis of an innovative project. 3. Reach creative solutions via an iteration of a virtually endless stream of world-changing ideas and strategies, integrating feedback, and learning from failures along the way. 4. Apply the 10 entrepreneurial tools in creating a business plan for a new innovative venture. 5. Apply methods and strategies learned from interviews with startup entrepreneurs and innovators. 6. Communicate and sell innovative ideas successfully.

This course, which is Part Three in the series of Startup Entrepreneurship specialization, offers Life Lessons from a Master Innovator, with proven achievements. During this course you will listen to conversations and interviews with Mr. David (Dadi) Perlmutter, who until recently was Executive VP of Intel corporate. Dadi will talk about 10 life lessons, based on his 34 years as a rebel innovator and entrepreneur.

We will share with you the following lessons: Love and Knowledge are infinite: grow and share; Learn from Failures and Successes; Nothing Moves without a Vision; Have a Differentiated Market Transforming Strategy; Dare to Take Action; Fight Resistance; It is All About the Ecosystem; Build a Team; Keep it Simple and Work Hard. By the end of the course the learner will: * Know how to lead a process of innovation and implement ideas through all its phases from discovery to delivery in your own field of choice. * Know how to apply creativity to generate creative ideas in a wide range of strategic management issues. * Know how to solve problems in general, with a high degree of innovative creative thinking, to widen the range of possible choices * Identify new and unfamiliar challenges and needs, reflect on them from a creative point of view (zoom in), decide on the action they require (zoom out) and generate a novel and useful solution * Transform ideas into real value-creating products, services and processes. * Be able to analyze both success and failure and draw conclusions from both, for improving future innovative efforts. * Be able to identify and create key features of innovative products and services and in doing so, generate strategically differentiated innovations that are unique * Be able to present your ideas persuasively and overcome resistance. * Know how to simplify a complex product and make it user friendly. Course assignments will include participation in two discussion groups and four assignments. In each assignment you will be asked to deal with a question relating to an interview you have seen.

"Action-Driven Business Plan: From the ‘Classroom’ to the World" is a capstone project, that requires you, our learner, to pull together all you will have learned in the three courses that comprise the "Startup Entrepreneurship" Specialization. This course is in fact the culmination of the process designed to provide you with the opportunity to demonstrate what you have learned on a real-world project of your choice.

During the following six weeks you will gradually create, improve and refine your business plan, moving from one milestone to another. Each week will begin with a short note from Prof. Maital, explaining what the current phase is about and providing you with points to consider while working on the assignments. We encourage you to practice what you have learned using the self-assessment practice quizzes and brainstorm with your peers in the weekly forums. During the first week you will create a non-business plan as an initial step towards creating your business plan. In weeks two, three and five, you will be required to submit three assignments for peer evaluation, which will help you to prepare your final business plan. At the end of the course you will prepare and submit your completed business plan and an effective two-minute video describing your idea. Your business plan will include the following sections: The Need, the Product, Unique Features, The Market and Future Developments, a Gantt chart and a project budget.