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The video below show how one team from the Startup experience course last spring experienced that course.
Do you want to learn about how to create new business? Do you want to join or set up a startup? This and much more you will learn in the Startup Experience course.
The Startup Experience offers you an opportunity to learn key skills needed to navigate the fast paced and unpredictable commercial environment.You will be taking a deep dive in examining trends and dabbling with exciting new ways to create you own value based commercial solution.
The course will suit a person who is adaptive, collaborative and creatively driven. Who is interested in going beyond conventional thinking practices to create effective teams and commercial value.
Startup experience course
What do students of the Startup Experience think about the course? To find out, what this video with Sean Corr, an exchange student at Aalto. Sean talks about his experience at Aalto and in particular what he learned by participating in the Startup Experience course.
Registration
The course is open to all Aalto students. To register for the course, you should take these two steps:
- Register on Oodi
- Upload a personal CV on the Participant CV's page (only available when you are logged in to mycourses)
If you want to act as the CEO for one of the course teams, you should also upload a separate application for the CEO role to the CEO applications section.
Participation is limited. The priority order for student selection is:
- Students for whom the course is mandatory (EIT Business Development Lab)
- Students that have chosen the AVP Startup Minor
- Other students so that the student base is as multidisciplinary as possible.
The deadline for the registration is January 5, 2018. The course starts with 3 kick-off sessions (Tuesday, Jan 9 09:00-12:00, Wednesday Jan 10 09:00 - 12:00 and Jan 11 14:00 - 16:00). You must participate in all 3 kick-off sessions in order to be accepted to the course. Final acceptance happens only after the Team formation day on January 16.
How much will you work
The course runs for the two periods. Each week there are two contact sessions, one workshop and pitching session on Tuesdays 9-12 and and a lecture session on Thursdays 14-16. The Tuesday session is focused on value creation, ie discovering and defining the product or service that the teams is working towards. The Thursday session is focused on operation topics such as teamwork, leadership, finance, marketing and operations.
The expected workload of this 10 ECTS course is ca 270h, which translates to weekly workload of ca 20h during the two first teaching periods of spring 2018 including the 5 hours of mandatory class time each week. There will be team deadlines on most weeks, so we recommend that you do not take another large project course while participating in this one.
What will you learn
The objectives of the course and of the teams is to use good lean and agile practices to research a user need or desire, define a business (product or service, business model, pricing etc) to fulfill the need and manage the team towards successful implementation of the business.
In the course you will learn three different skill sets:- Defining and validating a business based on deep customer and user insights and business testing.
- Developing themselves as team members, learning about their own strengths and how to apply those strengths in multidisciplinary teams.
- Gaining insight into the management of day-to-day operations in a small company including marketing, finance and operations.
As the main purpose of the course is to teach good practices and methods, grading will be based on the team's working practices and methods.
How we work
The course is a project course where students will form small companies (read: teams). These companies develop a new business and also manage the company in a simulation of how you would manage a small startup.
The teams will be formed by team CEOs. Anyone joining the course can apply to act as a CEO. The CEOs main role is to hire the team from the course participants at the beginning of the course. Having an own business idea helps in hiring but is not mandatory.
Once the team has been formed, all members will in turn act as the person in charge for the team's operations, we call this role COO (Chief Operating Officer). This means that all participants will in turn get a chance to practice their leadership skills.
Grading
The course is graded 0-5. The basis for the grade is the team performance. In addition personal performance will be evaluated based on how well each student performs in their COO role and in the final oral exam. The personal grade will be +-1 grade point from the team.
More information
For more information, contact the course teachers:
Håkan Mitts, hakan.mitts@aalto.fi, AVP