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Start-up 2021 – Ideate, Refine and Take to Market (5 cr)

Code: TX00ES72-3001

General information


Enrollment

18.02.2021 - 07.03.2021

Timing

08.03.2021 - 28.03.2021

Number of ECTS credits allocated

5 op

Virtual portion

5 op

Mode of delivery

Distance learning

Unit

ICT ja tuotantotalous

Campus

Karaportti 2

Teaching languages

  • English

Seats

0 - 40

Degree programmes

  • Degree Programme in Information Technology
  • Tieto- ja viestintätekniikan tutkinto-ohjelma

Teachers

  • Siva Ramamoorthy

Objective

The student will learn methods for finding ideas, refining and validation, customer conversations, building a lean start-up, and work in an start-up ecosystems.

Content

1. Finding a Great Idea:
We will get into the basics of finding good start-up ideas that can be executed on. Very broadly most start-up ideas comes from experience such as working in a domain or through passion.
I will like the students to come to come to day 1 of the class with two ideas. Idea 1 being a serious well though idea they may be passionate about. Idea2, a more experimental ideal. We will practice class concepts on idea 2. Once refines they can be applied on idea 1. Browse through the content below on ‘Ideation’ and the Linked Videos to get some ideas on Ideation methods.
2. Refining and validating the Idea
3. Customer Conversations to build on the Idea and makes changes as needed
4. Building a Lean Start-up and the first MVP
5. Next Steps post MVP to build and sell a real product

Location and time

Online (link will be provided later)
March 8-26, 2021 at 17:00-20:00 (Finnish time)

Teaching methods

Intensive course: evenings Monday-Friday over consecutive 3 weeks. Home assignments on different topics.

International connections

Instructor: Siva Ramamoorthy
Entrepreneur, Corporate Leader, Global Start-up Mentor, Board Member

Siva is a Corporate CEO, a Global Start-up mentor, an active teacher of Entrepreneurship, and has had two successful start-up tenures. He has served as a mentor, Stanford Ignite program at Stanford University, taught entrepreneurship at Metropolia University, Finland. He has also worked in senior corporate roles in Intel, VMware in the US and India. He serves as an AI/tech consultant to several young global companies. He serves on the Basel Area India Innovation Board, an activity of the Basel Area Switzerland’s Business and Innovation non-profit funded by the Swiss Government.
Siva holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, USA, and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky.

Content scheduling

Week 1 (Week of March 8):

1. Monday – Day 1 (March 8)
5 pm to 8 pm – Course Overview and Content Delivery (Siva)

2. Tuesday – Day 2 (March 9)
5 pm to 6 pm - Content Delivery (Siva)
6 pm to 7 pm – Set up of class and divide based on Idea/Groups/Individual as needed.
7 pm -8pm – Content Delivery (Siva)

3. Wednesday – Day 3 (March 10)
5 pm to 6 pm- Content Delivery (Siva).
6 pm to 8 pm – Student Presentations (Idea)

4. Thursday – Day 4 (March 11)
5 pm to 7 pm Content Delivery (Siva)
7 pm to 8 pm Home work set up on Assumptions.

5. Friday – Day 5 (March 12)
5 pm to 7 pm – Student Presentations on Assumptions (Assumptions they are making in building their startup),
7 pm to 8 pm Content Delivery

Week 2 (Week of March 15th):

6. Monday –Day 6 (March 15th)
5 pm to 7 pm Content Delivery (Siva).
7 pm to 8 pm – Set up plans for Students to do Customer Interviews

7. Tuesday – Day 7 (March 16th)
5 pm to 6 pm – Support Hour for students while they are doing Prospective Customer Interviews

8. Wednesday – Day 8 (March 17th)
5 pm to 8 pm – Students Presentations on Customer Interviews

9. Thursday – Day 9 (March 18th)
5 pm to 8 pm Content Delivery (Siva)

10. Friday –Day 10 (March 19th)
5 pm to 7 pm – Content Delivery (Siva) and Planning for Students MVP

Week 3 (Week of March 22nd):

11. Monday – Day 11 (March 22nd)
5 pm to 7 pm – Support Hour for students to get heir questions answered while building the MVP

12. Tuesday – Day 12 (March 23th)
5 pm to 6 pm – Support Hour for Students to Seek help while they are building their MVP

13. Wednesday - Day 13 (March 24th)
5 to 8 pm – Student Presentations on Their Minimum Viable Product

14. Thursday – Day 14 (March 25th)
5 to 8 pm – Student Presentations (Continue) – Content Delivery (Post that)

15. Friday - Day 15 (March 26th)
5 to 8 pm – Closing Content, Sales and Marketing Ideas

Further information

Introduction to the Course (preliminary):

Over the last two decades, we have seen an extraordinary growth of start-ups and start-up ecosystems. While entrepreneurship has been present since humans walked this planet, the focus on entrepreneurship has become much more mainstream since the late 1980s. What is the difference in entrepreneurship from earlier waves of entrepreneurship and today? Is it easier for entrepreneurs today to leverage the previous generation's knowledge and experiences, even the generation of the late 2010s?
In this course, I believe the answer is YES.
In the last decades, a new concept of a start-up ecosystem has emerged. Start-up ecosystems are clusters/ gatherings of entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, supporting state and federal governments, customers, including corporate customers. Start-up ecosystem members such as incubators and accelerators enable a greater percentage of start-ups to succeed. Besides, earlier entrepreneurs' knowledge has been created into formalized learning opportunities and frameworks such as MVP/Lean Start-ups. Knowledge is also much more democratic now with ubiquitous access through tools such as YouTube.
This course will bring such knowledge to a more practical real situation, leveraging my personal experience to augment existing knowledge. The course is intended to be a careful balance between robust/ analytics frameworks and real-life experience.
We will cover the following content:
1. Finding a Great Idea:
We will get into the basics of finding good start-up ideas that can be executed on. Very broadly most start-up ideas comes from experience such as working in a domain or through passion.
I will like the students to come to come to day 1 of the class with two ideas. Idea 1 being a serious well though idea they may be passionate about. Idea2, a more experimental ideal. We will practice class concepts on idea 2. Once refines they can be applied on idea 1. Browse through the content below on ‘Ideation’ and the Linked Videos to get some ideas on Ideation methods.
2. Refining and validating the Idea
3. Customer Conversations to build on the Idea and makes changes as needed
4. Building a Lean Start-up and the first MVP
5. Next Steps post MVP to build and sell a real product
The following are the various Modules and home works/ case studies (including pre-work):
Module 1- Finding a Great idea - IDEATION
Good ideas that translate into a start-up often come from two different streams (a) Through Inspiration and (ii) Perspiration.
Inspiration:
These are ideas that fit the “5 am brain wave” theme. They could be in fields related to your career (or future career) or could be unrelated. It could be in areas of your interest/hobbies or could be unrelated. It is often an inspirational new idea triggered by a particular external stimuli. The stimuli could be related to a newspaper/magazine article, an experience while traveling or during vacation or could be during a casual conversation. A strong stimulus that has a high passion quotient often creates a strong inspiration/ motivational element for the founding teams.
Some examples of Inspirational Ideas could be:
1) While traveling I took 100’s of pictures in between 3 cameras (Android Phone, iPhone and SLR Camera). However, when trying to send pictures to friends I drew a blank. After the vacation, while trying to build an album, I realized it was a hard task. Key problems including:
a. How to get the actual full size files from the android phone, from the iPhone and the SLR Camera?
b. How and where do I store the files? Is it in Google drive, my laptop drive, an external drive. Do I sore them based on year, month of taking or the activity (ex. Sky driving).
c. How do I make it easy to find the files when I search? How do I make sure I don’t loose the files.
d. What are good online photo albums? Should I choose a lossless one or accept some losses (like Google photos)
e. How to make good online albums?
2) While traveling I keep looking for great music that uplifts my mood. Every time I hear that music, I recall the uplifted mood state I was in and my mood gets back to the same uplifted stage. I recently read a news article about personalized music and it triggered a problem statement that I could relate with. How about an AI based music recommender that will sense my mood/ my ambience/ my location/ my online interactions and suggest music based on my listening patterns?
Perspiration:
Ideas in this category come from identifying a problem within your day to day work or other regular activity that needs creative problem solving. Examples of Ideas in this category include:
a. A practising telecom network professional identifies the need for Optical networking equipment to handle 5 times more traffic at much lower price points. (Problem statement behind many optical networking start-ups).
b. A practising Information Tech professional working for a large computer maker identifies the need for database software to process greater amount of data in a faster manner – Larry Ellison founding Oracle in early 1990s
c. A very successful entrepreneur identifies digital music as the key next step in personal computing experience (Steve Jobs – iPod in his second stint at Apple around the year 2000).
Home Work 1 – Preferable done before the course starts
Based on your your personal passions/ hobbies/ lifestyle/ culture/work/friends circle/ sports you play or any other sources of personal/ professional stimuli identify one or two ideas which you would like to evaluate for being a start-up. Ideally come up with two ideas; we will use one for classroom purposes. You can later build on your more serious idea into a real start-up with some feedback during the class.
Supporting Content:
YouTube video – Idea Evaluation published on Mar 23, 2010, by Stanford Graduate School of Business (Yes it is old, but Idea generation is a well established concept for over a decade). Good panel discussion with multiple views on "What is a good idea and how to evaluate them”.
Module 2- Refining and Validating the Idea
Start-ups and start-up ecosystems often have well established step by step ways of qualifying ideas and taking them to market. In this module we will learn the concept of lean start-ups, Minimum Viable product (MVP). We will also learn a formalized experimentation method to generate a minimum product which is generally useful to the customer that they pay for it. We will go through a sequence of several steps for scanning an idea and validating the idea including:
• Build/ refine an idea from an initial phase of raw inspiration or perspiration such that it can be communicated at least at a high level to a prospective customer/ employee.
• Validate the feasibility of the Idea through a series of prospective customer interviews. Customer interviews are often conversations where the entrepreneur explains the idea and asks for feedback.
• Research on the market using tools of both primary research and secondary research.
• Define the customers based on the segmentation of the market, customer needs, and customer capacity to purchase a product. Most initial versions of a start-ups product are built based on a razor-thin definition of a paying customer.
• Define the Product / Solution (Solution in case of a service or a none product start-up) roadmap starting with the first version, then the MVP, the first product for a generic customer and later evolutions of the product.
• Validate the product with customer trails and rollouts. Real validation of a product/solution is the customer’s capacity to pay for the product and his/her capacity to use the product and create value from the product.
• Pre-Sell and sell the product acquiring more and more customer knowledge at each stage of the sales/ pre-sales cycle.
• Support and further sell the product- while an initial sale is a key indication for product/ solution validation; a continued customer usage of the product is a far more serious validation of the product relevance.
Supporting Content:
Validate your business idea: THE LEAN STARTUP by Eric Ries – YouTube video Published on Apr 20, 2017
Short video builds a framework of step by step idea evaluation, just like we will cover in the course using simple examples of board games. The Zappos example of an online shoe store MVP is very useful.
Module 3- Customer Conversations to build on the Idea and Pivot if needed
Even well-qualified ideas need clear customer validation. A start-up is for real only when:
• A customer pays for the product/ service
• The customer uses the product
It is extremely critical to have a large number of customer (or rather future customer) conversations. Defining the customer is a deep topic and even fortune 500 companies have varying definitions of who their customer is over their lifecycle.
Customer conversations need to be had in multiple ambiences:
• One on one conversations so that we understand individual customer motivations
• Group customer conversations so that we understand 'group think behaviors' of customers.
• Conversations while being in the customer's world, in their place of usage of the product/ services
In this section, we will explore having such conversations with customers. We will divide the class into groups and role-play as needed. If your idea is well developed and if you would like to have “real world” customer conversations, feel free to do so.
Supporting Content:
The Rules for Customer Interviews – LIFFFTInc Published on Aug 23, 2013 – Excellent short video giving some clear Do’s and Don’t’s on Quality Customer Interviews.
Module 4 - Building a Lean Start-up and the first MVP
In this section, we will explore building a simulated version of your real start-up.
Over the customer conversations and your personal hypothesis, you would have acquired a view of the customer problem you are looking to solve and your initial approach to solve it. In this module we will make several assumptions (hypothesis) and test them out. In a real start-up facing the real market, I would expect a start-up to have 1000’s of hypothesis. Testing all of them is an impossible task, but the more they are tested the better it will be.
After testing the Hypothesis, we will build a start-up in simulation. There are many ways to build a prototype including (a) Hand sketches (b) Wire frame (c)Mock-ups (d) Physical prototype (e) Photoshop, Graphic tools, etc.. The more serious and comprehensive the simulation, the better the chances of success.
In the course, we will have several breakout sessions where students will build hypothesis and test them with customer conversations.The same methods that we use in the class can be used later in building the real start-up.
Supporting Content:
YouTube – Michael Seibel – How to Plan an MVP posted by Y Combinator
A fairly short video explains concepts of MVP. Also gives you exposure to Y Combinator one of the world’s largest start-up ecosystems.
Module 5 - Post MVP – Sales and Marketing
Building a MVP is not a onetime activity and will need continuous refining. However, post building the first version of the MVP the focus will be on Operations, Sales and Marketing. In this section, we will look at important sales and marketing strategies for start-ups essentials including:
1. Building customer persona’s- our easiest customer and how are they segmented? What are the unique attributes that define them?
2. Sales Skills for start-ups – What to do when you have very little to sell (a product that barely works)
3. Segmenting and focussing on the best customers – very essential for early stages
4. Sales steps including – Prospecting, qualifying a lead, Presenting, Negotiations, Post-sales activities
We will also explore other essential areas of start-up success including (i) Attracting employees (ii) raising funds (iii) Local issues specific to your region.
Supporting Content:
Lecture 19 – Sales and Marketing; How to Talk to Investors (Tyler Bosmeny; YC Partners) – Another Stanford Y-Combinator content. Gives a perspective from a start-up founder who joined an early stage start-up as their sales head without much previous sales experience.

Evaluation scale

Hyväksytty/Hylätty

Assessment criteria, satisfactory (1)

The student will learn methods for finding ideas, refining and validation, customer conversations, building a lean start-up, and work in an start-up ecosystems.

Assessment criteria, approved/failed

The student knows about methods for finding ideas, refining and validation, customer conversations, building a lean start-up, and work in an start-up ecosystems.

Assessment methods and criteria

Assessment is based on home work, activity, and student presentations.

Further information

Instructor Profile:

Siva is a Corporate CEO, a Global Start-up mentor, an active teacher of Entrepreneurship, and has had two successful start-up tenures. He has served as a mentor, Stanford Ignite program at Stanford University, taught entrepreneurship at Metropolia University, Finland. He has also worked in senior corporate roles in Intel, VMware in the US and India. He serves as an AI/tech consultant to several young global companies. He serves on the Basel Area India Innovation Board, an activity of the Basel Area Switzerland’s Business and Innovation non-profit funded by the Swiss Government.
Siva holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, USA, and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky.