General
Do you want to learn about how to create new business and make an impact? Do you want to join or set up a startup within sustainable development goals (SDGs)? 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 registration could be done on Oodi
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 6, 2020. The course starts with 3 kick-off sessions (Tuesday, January 7, 09:00-12:00, Wednesday January 8, 09:00 - 12:00 and January 9, 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 14.
NOTE: This also applies to students for whom the course is mandatory.
Before Startup experience course we recommend you to take 2 credits course “Starting up” - https://starting-up.org/en/
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, 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 spring 2020 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: multidisciplinary teams). These companies develop new business within topic of SDGs and also manage the company in a simulation of how you would manage a small startup.
The teams will choose the topics to proceed with. Thus, students can have an own business idea within topic of SDGs. It is not mandatory, but if your are convincing enough, your team might work on your topic.
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 System for Startup Experience
The course is graded 0-5.
80% - team grade
20% - individual grade (individual exam)
Team grade
Final pitch – 30% (Business potential, pitching, business innovation)
First pitch and pitch rehearsal (pitch 5) we don’t grade
Pitches 2,3,4 – 30%
The average grade for group assignment – 20%
More Information
For more information, contact the course teachers:
Lidia Borisove, lidia.borisova@aalto.fi, AVP
Sami Tuomi, sami.tuomi@aalto.fi, AVP