Frequently the success of a new venture is not just a good product – but combined with good marketing. Yet many ventures are started without a market orientation – which can be a costly and fatal mistake. This course combines marketing approaches with insights on how marketing principles are applied in new ventures and entrepreneurial business situations. While fundamental marketing principles are still relevant, these will be applied with an entrepreneurial angle that is characterized by innovativeness, opportunity gap focus, resource leveraging, customer intimacy; differential competitive advantages and value creation that is aligned with changes in the business landscape.

The course enables students to discover how adopting entrepreneurial marketing thinking will help them to:

1. Gain an understanding of the functional role of marketing in the wider context of a business and entrepreneurship setting
2. Answer the crucial "What am I selling, to whom and why, and how can I be a market leader" question
3. Appreciate marketing from both a conceptual and entrepreneurial real-world application basis
4. Apply digital marketing techniques in a real-life situation
5. Assess the role of digitalization in the development of an entrepreneurship venture
6. Evaluate how contemporary marketing techniques can be used for maximizing entrepreneurial success

The start-up scene in a global context is exploding, with increasingly more new start-ups raising large amounts of venture capital and disrupting existing business models on a grand scale. What does it take to finance new ventures? Typical start-ups and young companies have impressing financial needs but face limited access to traditional financing enjoyed by well-established firms. Investing in such new ventures is characterized by very high degrees of uncertainty and complex asymmetries of information between investors and the entrepreneur which can lead to misalignment of incentives and conflicts of interest. Understanding the appropriate modes of financing new ventures at different stages is highly important for entrepreneurs. They need to learn how to value new venture as well as to structure financing as the new venture progresses.

Learning Objectives

1. To provide students with the knowledge to do an advanced analysis of the major issues associated with venture capital and private equity
2. To provide students with knowledge and skillset to raise angel or venture capital investment to finance start-ups or venture high growth
3. To enable students to evaluate the differences in investing and the potential risks and returns
4. To enable the students to analyze the rationale for investing: diversification, control and return enhancement
5. To evaluate the different stages of venture capital investing, the investment process for typical venture investment, and the qualities that a venture capital firm looks for in a potential investment
6. To evaluate the key factors affecting the performance of venture capital investments and how the risk/return tradeoff of investing in later-stage firms, compared with early-stage startups and public equity investment

Entrepreneurs need to explore the multiple dimensions of venture growth, such as new products, new services, new markets, new customers, and new business models, through various framework and approaches. Students in this course will develop plans for ventures to grow by leveraging current capabilities of the venture and to develop new ones. This course is particularly useful for entrepreneurs who are setting off with the opportunities identified and bringing their firms to achieve and sustain their competitiveness and employing relevant strategies in the changing landscape, through the various stages of the industry life cycle.

After completion of the course, the student will be able to:

1. Understand what growth is, and how it is different from achieving efficiency
2. Become familiar with techniques and frameworks to asses growth opportunities
3. Act upon growth:
   • identify situations/opportunities for growth
   • craft action plans to address opportunities/situation through a doable path to achieve growth
4. Know how to develop user-centric products according to customer behavior
5. Understand the various finance options available to businesses and make smart financial planning for business growth
6. Have a better understanding of the role of the Manager of a Growing Venture
7. Develop effective management skills such as written communication skills (i.e. memos, proposals, and reports), presentation and interviewing skills, as well as teamwork skills, i.e., leading and being led

Students not only need to develop deep knowledge and advanced skills in certain function areas related to entrepreneurship and innovation, they also need to widen their horizons, especially on emerging technologies, and gain multiple perspectives through access to technology experts' real life entrepreneurship stories and information. The course provides valuable channels necessary for students interested in entrepreneurial careers and introduce them to resources in the entrepreneurial arena while providing a platform for networking and career development.

This course aims to enable students to:

1. Gain technology exposure
2. Identify the economic value of technologies
3. Create business opportunities
4. Develop innovative and viable business model
5. Design the technology commercialization process

This course is designed to introduce some of the key activities to reach and sustain profitability. The learners will learn the most important rule of entrepreneurship, practice the different kinds of fundraising exercises, how to develop strategies to retain them. You'll also hear from successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, who will talk about what indicators of success they look for when deciding where to invest.