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Do you want to learn about how to create new business? Do you want to join or set up a startup? In the Startup Experience course you will learn useful skills to help you get new businesses off the gound!
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?
This is what Bas Burma, CEO of CodeSandbox, thought about the course:
"The startup experience course helped me get more insight into specific parts of entrepreneurship like Finance and Strategy. These insights are really useful because as an entrepreneur you fulfil different roles in your startup and need to know a bit about everything. "
After the course, Bas and his co-founder Ives van Hoorne, raised $2.4M seedfunding for their company (that they has started already before Bas joined Startup Experience).
And this is what Sean Corr, an exchange student at Aalto, thought about. In the video 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:
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 September 6, 2019. The course starts with 3 kick-off sessions (Tuesday, September 10, 09:00-12:00, Wednesday September 11, 09:00 - 12:00 and September 12, 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 September 17. NOTE: This also applies to students for whom the course is mandatory.
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 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 are working towards. The Thursday session is focused on operation topics such as teamwork, leadership, finance, marketing and operations.
The expected workload of this 9 ECTS course is ca 250h, which translates to the weekly workload of ca 20h during the two first teaching periods of autumn 2019 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 are 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 fulfil 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.
Below you can see out course outcome in terms of company pitches by two teams from the Spring 2019 course.
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 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 like 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 of 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 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:
Lidia Borisove, lidia.borisova@aalto.fi, AVP
Håkan Mitts, hakan.mitts@aalto.fi, AVP
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