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    Welcome to Startup Experience Spring 2023

    Design your entrepreneurial style

    The Startup Experience is full of ups and downs, struggles and joys. You will be creating and testing business ideas and a minimum viable product (MVP) in student teams. With the help of teachers, peers and many guest lecturers, we will support you as you discover real customer needs, test ideas, and come up with viable solutions. This course is for you to feel what it’s like to take your ideas to market.

    In this course students will be able to:

    1. Design a viable and sustainable business model
    2. Demonstrate customer understanding and value proposition
    3. Evaluate and create competitive advantage 
    4. Exercise psychological and intellectual flexibility
    5. Prototype, iterate and use experimentation to develop services and products 
    6. Appraise positive and negative impacts on their environments 
    7. Build and lead a team

    The course simulates the real-world challenges (as far as possible) startups might encounter and how to overcome them. Startup Experience is experiential, and it consists of workshops and hands-on team assignments based on teams' venture ideas. The Sustainable Development Goals play an important role, as well. To help you understand more what it's like to undertake such a journey, here is an example of the teams that have gone through the experience together: https://avp.aalto.fi/of-teams-dreams-and-sdgs-a-startup-experience-story/

    Building scalable empathy and care for a sustainable future

    Caring about other people is the foundation of a healthy society. This journey focuses on the customers and their needs. Understanding their lives, habits, and values leads to empathy. Many students want to solve global issues and we are here to help you learn where to start and how to get going.  You will discover how to research and collect data that would assist in deepening the relationship with potential customers. The internal values you have will be made visible in the impacts you have on society. 

    At your service – at what cost?

    Balancing technology, innovative ideas and sustainable thinking with customer needs and demands is not easy. You will learn to think of others first, without losing the common sense needed to keep a business moving forward. Between needs and financial responsibility is a feasible business model. Through negotiation and communication skills, teams will explore the principle of maximum efficiency, always searching for the most economical options that meet sustainable and ethical business expectations.

    Should I optimize, pivot or focus?

    In teams, you will execute a creative design process. The opportunities and dilemmas related to this process will require you to embrace methods for effective decision-making and harnessing intuition. You will build multiple prototypes and will be using them to understand problems and potential solutions. Ideation and problem solving are the foundations of a viable product or service. Deciding when to cut your ideas off, change your mind, or renew your commitment to your ideas is key to any successful startup.

    Personal growth and style

    You will also investigate your own ways of being and learn how to find meaning in and through your work. Psychological flexibility and resilience to criticism, failures and uncertainty are abilities that need to be developed. By implementing the concept of radical well-being, you can be a more cooperative, productive, and creative individual. You will explore what it takes to build trust and what it means to have your own entrepreneurial style.

    Work in teams 

    The project work is done in multinational and multidisciplinary teams, so you will be faced with new team dynamics and changing roles and responsibilities, while also finding your personal boundaries. By curating team culture, and cultivating creativity, motivation, and mutual trust within the team, you will elevate each other’s potential.

    The Startup Experience way

    All communication and sharing of information will be conducted on Mycourses and through email. You will be our main priority and should you want to discuss anything, feel free to reach out to Teddy, who will be your mentor throughout the course. The workload for Startup Experience is commonly 27 hours per week so make sure to clear your schedule and manage your time wisely. You should not have any other major projects going on during period III-IV. Course time allocation equivalent for 9 credits is 243 hours. 


    Workload allocation
    Contact sessions 68 hours
    Lectures and guest speakers' visits 13 x 2 = 26h
    Assignments 175 hours
    Individual self reflection videos (3 videos) 5 h
    Pre-reading and prepared videos 30 h
    Value proposition canvas (updates and reflections) 30 h
    Prototype (building, testing and validating) 50h
    Interviews (preparation work and data processing) 30h
    Financial work (funding, cash flow, budgeting, investment, market size) 30h

    The timetable

    The first week will feature a miniature version of Startup Experience, where we will have a 3-day marathon. 

    10th January: Tuesday, Learning Hub, Atrium, Maarintie 8, 13:00-16:00

    11th January: Wednesday, AS1, Maarintie 8,  9:00-12:00

    12th January: Thursday F101, Vare, 14:00-16:00

    The remaining of the course will be as followed: 

    From 18.1 until 8.2, Wednesday U8-U270, Undergraduate Center, 9:00-12:00

    From 15.2 until 5.4, Wednesday U9-U271, Undergraduate Center, 9:00-12:00

    From 12.1 until 26.1, Thursday F101, Vare, 14:00-16:00 

    2.2 Thursday, Q101, Vare, 14:00-16:00 

    9.2 Thursday, F101, Vare, 14:00-16:00

    From 16.2 until 30.3, Thursday, U7, Undergraduate Center, 14:00-16:00

    (Changes will be made if they are necessary) 

    Registration

    The course is open to all Aalto students. Registration can be done via Sisu. 


    You can start to register for Startup Experience from December 12th, 2022. The deadline for registration is 4th January 2023. The course starts with a kick-off session on Tuesday the 10th of January at Atrium, Maarintie 8 from 9:00 until 12:00.

    Before or simultaneously with Startup experience course we recommend you to take 2 credits online course “Starting up” - https://starting-up.org/en/ and/or the 1-credit online course TU-C2080 Entrepreneurship Essentials.


    The course staffs
    Headteacher is Johannes Kaira. 

    Co-teachers include Paul Savage and Teddy Tran. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. 

    Teddy Duy Tran, duy.tran@aalto.fi, AVP

    Johannes Kaira, johannes.kaira@aalto.fi, AVP

    Paul Savage, paul.savage@aalto.fi, AVP