GRA 3161 Developing the Entrepreneurial Mindset
GRA 3161 Developing the Entrepreneurial Mindset
What characteristics distinguish entrepreneurs from other business managers? What skills and insights do entrepreneurs require to launch a new venture? What does it take to scale up? These are fundamental questions about entrepreneurship to be worked out during this course.
This class combines students' active participation in hands-on exercises and discussions with recent research on personal aspects of entrepreneurship. It focuses on helping students gain the knowledge, skills, and tools to recognize entrepreneurship as a process rather than an end point.
Students will gain knowledge of:
- entrepreneurship as practice and process
- the characteristics of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial action
- how entrepreneurial opportunities are developed
- creative collaboration and organizing new ventures
Students will develop skills related to:
- curiosity, opportunity creation and action orientation
- customer discovery through assessment of product/market fit
- explorative and experimental learning, reflection in/on action
- inter-disciplinary collaboration and team development
- presentation and pitching
Upon completion of the program the students should be able to:
- reflect on and apply knowledge and skills to understand the particular challenges of entrepreneurs in business and society
- apply appropriate methods to identify, analyze and develop new and innovative business solutions
- establish and reflect on own values, self-management, motivation and drive, that may enable entrepreneurial leadership and culture building
Students will learn to combine insights across multiple domains in order to bring novel approaches and solutions to big, risky and challenging questions.
Students will learn and practice how to evaluate opportunities from multiple vantage points, create a unique value proposition, and what it takes to assess the market potential for a new idea as a stand-alone company or as a new avenue in a corporate setting. They will learn how to make decisions under conditions of technical and market uncertainty.
The course will also address soft skills such as self-management, personality, identity, motivation, communication and cooperation, in combination with theories of learning and culture development.
Students will get a basic understanding and practice of how to champion their ideas under a variety of audiences, such as potential investors, employees, and executives.
The learning process will consist of lectures, working with different cases and scenarios, and team exercises. The main part of the learning process will consist of a combination of entrepreneurial action and entrepreneur interviews, state-of-the-art theory and research, and individual and group reflection. The students will learn to develop entrepreneurial opportunities, and be introduced to the ‘customer discovery process’; assess the problem/solution fit, and the product/market fit. Elements of an entrepreneurial mindset will be outlined from research, and discussed and practiced through discussions and exercises.
Please note that while attendance is not compulsory in all courses, it is the student’s own responsibility to obtain any information provided in class.
This is a course with continuous assessment (several exam components) and one final exam code. Each exam component is graded by using points on a scale from 0-100. The components will be weighted together according to the information in the course description in order to calculate the final letter grade for the examination code (course). Students who fail to participate in one/some/all exam elements will get a lower grade or may fail the course. You will find detailed information about the point system and the cut off points with reference to the letter grades when the course starts.
At resit, all exam components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course.
| Assessments |
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Exam category: Activity Form of assessment: Class participation Weight: 25 Grouping: Individual Duration: 1 Semester(s) Exam code: GRA 31611 Grading scale: Point scale leading to ECTS letter grade Resit: All components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course |
Exam category: Submission Form of assessment: Written submission Weight: 75 Grouping: Group (1 - 4) Duration: 1 Semester(s) Comment: Project paper Exam code: GRA 31611 Grading scale: Point scale leading to ECTS letter grade Resit: All components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course |
A course of 1 ECTS credit corresponds to a workload of 26-30 hours. Therefore a course of 6 ECTS credits corresponds to a workload of at least 160 hours.