Subject description

This course explores the dynamics of corporate venturing and the development of innovation ecosystems. It covers the strategies for creating and managing ventures within a corporate structure, fostering an environment conducive to innovation, and leveraging external partnerships and networks for sustainable growth.

Learning objectives

Understand the fundamentals of corporate venturing and innovation ecosystems. Learn to identify and evaluate opportunities for corporate ventures. Develop strategies for building and sustaining innovation ecosystems. Analyze the role of leadership, culture, and governance in corporate innovation. Explore real-world examples and case studies of successful corporate ventures and ecosystems.

2

Subject description

Entrepreneurial ventures often require external funding to turn ideas into viable businesses. This course focuses on how founders understand, evaluate, and secure financing to support the launch and growth of their startups. Entrepreneurial finance differs from traditional corporate finance in critical ways, including the types of investors involved, the uncertainty of outcomes, the role of control, and the design of investment terms.

Students will approach financing decisions from both the perspectives of the entrepreneur and investor. They will learn how to assess funding needs, choose among different sources of capital, such as angel investors, venture capital, and alternative financing, and evaluate the implications of each on ownership, control, and long-term value creation. At the same time, students will also explore how investors are organized and how they evaluate, structure, and exit investments.

Throughout the course, students will analyze real-world startup cases, interpret term sheets, analyze venture investment opportunities, and learn how to communicate and negotiate effectively. As such, this course is valuable for students who want to launch a startup or start investing in them, or understand the financial strategies that support innovation and growth.

Learning objectives

In this course, students will develop a comprehensive understanding of all major topics throughout the entrepreneurial finance process. The main goal of the course is to provide students with methodologies, tools, and experiences to either make investments in startups or raise funding for their ventures in the future. Each session consists of a combination of proven frameworks, academic evidence, and practical examples.

Subject description

Intrapreneurship and Business Innovation is about how to manage the innovation discipline inside a big organization

Defining innovation as something new that brings positive change in terms of impact, we will review how innovation impact on every area of an organization and what is mean to innovate from a corporate perspective

The intersection between pure innovation and corporate business is a real challenge, that we will face with real examples during the whole course

We will act as a Chief Innovation or Chief Trasnformation Officer and they challenge this role face on a day-to-day basis, such as:

Corporate innovation and their components Innovation Strategy and Future Design Business Design Intrapreneurship & Culture Transformation Agile Organizations and the Agile Method

The course is thought to be more than 50% hands-on, meaning that the students will not only learn about the concepts but will also apply them all.

We will start with a case (Industry, Context and Challenge) that we will work through the whole course and that will be key part on the evaluation system. It will a simulation of a new Chief Innovation Officer entering to the role into a big corporation and being ask in the first 30 days to develop the whole innovation model for the company.

Learning objectives

- Understand the central role of entrepreneurship in corporate renewal, growth and transformation.

The main goal of the course is to prepare the students with the concepts, methodologies, tools, and experience to perform at a very high level on:

Innovation department of any corporation

The innovation role within any business units

Disrupt their business units with the introduction of the innovation concepts

Launch new innovations on the corporate ecosystem 2 Manage any innovation project withing a corporate environment

Develop new methodologies around innovation

The idea is to take one real corporate case and run the first 90 days as an Innovation Director, to build the skills necessary to lead the discipline in any kind of company

Subject description

SCALE-UPS or Scale-ups is new course, part of the part of the Entrepreneurship & Corporate Innovation concentration. It is inspired by a conversation i had with Professor Dan Isenberg who created the entrepreneurship ecosystem project at Babson Executive Education. Entrepreneurship and startups are not one and the same. Many startups are not entrepreneurial and much entrepreneurship is not about startups. In 1999 Icelander Robert Wessman came home from Germany, took over a badly teetering generic pharmaceuticals company with one product in the market, poured his life savings and house into it (and a lot of outside cash) and within eight years grew it 100 times into a global leader with 11,000 employees, 650 products, operations in 40 countries, over $2 billion in sales, and fifth in the world (ACT, now number 3, market capitalisation of $30 billion, not too far from Facebook’s about a year ago). In 2001 Ron Zwanziger founded Inverness Medical (now Alere) out of the leftover assets from the $1.3 billion sale of his glucose-monitoring business (OneTouch) to Johnson & Johnson: today Alere is worth $3 billion. There is a startup traffic jam. What seems to be clear is that there has been a sharp increase in the ranks of tech starts, a trend that may continue. What is less clear is whether this is generally beneficial to entrepreneurs or society, contrary to what the report strongly implies. Leaving aside whether iPhone-based lute-tuning is a market- maker (we’ll let the market sort that out), it is very likely that the on-ramp of startups has been jam packed, while the actual speed on the highway has not been impacted at all. In fact, the entire highway just may move more slowly as a result of the startup glut —that is, firms that have the wherewithal to scale into socially and economically valuable ventures, may just be slowed down by the on-ramp traffic build up, the hype, and the valuable resources startups tie up. Scaling up is vastly harder than starting up. What is much more certain is that, as anyone who has tried, as I have, can tell you, starting up a venture is just the first baby step on a long hard trudge to scale up. But without the ability to scale way beyond start, all the blood, sweat and tears (and money) will be flushed right down the drain. The Economist does warn us that starting up a venture is back breaking, but that start is such a short leg of the journey: back-breaking during your first months is nothing compared to running the entire marathon with your startup-broken back. It typically takes a decade or longer, not months or a couple years, to build a venture of value, with any semblance of robustness and return. The few that pop through in a few years are by far the aberration. For that matter, Silicon Valley may be the aberration. There is little fundamentally new in entrepreneurship just because some of it happens faster. Everything happens faster, all the time, and almost always has. Entrepreneurs, as long as there has been human society, have always raced to take advantage of inefficiencies and overlooked opportunities to do something that in prospect looks startlingly wonderful and in hindsight kind of obvious. Three millennia ago Phoenician entrepreneurs set sail to build global businesses base on innovations in stellar navigation, silver ore extraction, and marvellously fast Tyrian purple dye extracted from shellfish bile. Entrepreneurship is always surprising: in fact, if it’s predictable, it probably isn’t entrepreneurship. There is nothing new about starting lean. That is how my grandfather and generations before and after launched their businesses—know your customer, take small incremental risks, adjust your products as you go, and be capital efficient. That’s what I learned in Israel in the early 1980s from Stef Wertheimer, who sold his wholly-owned Iscar to Warren Buffett in 2006 for $6 billion in cash: work hard to get one fantastic customer by knocking his socks off with your product, and don’t monkey around with fancy finances until you do. It is uncalled for to “discover” a “new” form of entrepreneurship just because of the venture capital excesses (known only with 20/20 hindsight) of the late 1990s. And most ventures that scale big fast need substantial capital in some form, anyway (bank debt as much as risky equity capital). Maybe in a few years someone will write a book about fat scale ups. Platforms are all around us. Every city planner knows that one of the biggest economic development platforms is the metro system around which blossom huge ecosystems of work, life and play. Walmart is a platform for thousands of suppliers, as are the movie industry in Hollywood and fresh water in Wisconsin. Malls are platforms. Just because the platforms are digital doesn’t make the phenomenon fundamentally new. economist.com economists-special-report-on-tech-startups

Learning objectives

Understand the central role of entrepreneurship in corporate renewal, growth, and transformation.

The desired learning outcomes at the conclusion of the course are that participants understand:

• 1. The most interesting companies to work for post MBA are not the unicorns but the next unicorns
• 2. What companies are doing interesting things in areas such as AI, Fintech, Health,
• Retail and Crypto.
• 3. Which countries and which cities in these countries are good places to work4. Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world (Hillary Clinton)
• 5. Deeptech investing is very different to B2B/B2C.

Subject description

Social Entrepreneurship is a rapidly changing business field that examines the practice of identifying, starting and growing successful mission-driven for profit and nonprofit ventures, organizations that strive to advance social change through innovative solutions. The Social Entrepreneurship elective aims to assist would-be social entrepreneurs in developing innovative, sustainable and scalable organizations that deliver measurable social value. The course is ideally

1 suited for students interested in how to structure, execute and maintain impact-led social enterprises, but relevant applications can be drawn for those working in sustainability or impact functions in conventional for-profit businesses, innovative non-profits or family offices. The overall purpose of the course is to enable students to consider social value creation as a career compass and/or gain a valuable expertise to work in the growing social innovation ecosystem.

The course is designed to prompt students to be critical, pragmatic, and inspired thinkers about key issues involving social entrepreneurship and socially driven business decisions designed for maximum impact. To do so, we will look at the field of social innovation as a mindset and as a practice.

Learning objectives

- Understand how to launch an entrepreneurial project in a market through design of effective strategies. - Develop an awareness of the power of corporate entrepreneurship to create sustainable and social value. - Develop an awareness of the power of intrapreneurship to create sustainable and social value.

Social entrepreneurship as a mindset:

To foster this mindset, we will incorporate principles of ethics, social innovation and human centred design thinking as a set of methods to cultivate our empathy and deep understanding of social problems. The course will invite students to reconceptualize business as a vehicle for positive impact, utilising markets for social and environmental gain as its primary objective, as opposed to an adjunct to profit maximisation.

Social entrepreneurship a practice:

The course will not only provide practical tools about how to structure for-profit enterprises for impact, how to deliver impact, and how to maintain and sclae that impact over time. While not a technical course, students will be exposed to basic skills and strategies for measuring and communicating impact. Most importantly, students develop a critically refined view of the concept of “impact”, how to measure it, and how to choose the right organizational form for the targeted problem ensuring it is appropriate to the local context. Through case discussion, hands-on work with real social entrepreneurs, “action learning” workshops, coaching sessions, and peer group feedback, special emphasis will be put on introducing the students to the mechanics of developing and growing an impact-oriented organization.