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    Welcome to Startup Experience Spring 2024

    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.

    Timetable and Registration: 
    The course is open to all Aalto students, and registration can be done via Sisu starting from 11.12.2023. The deadline for registration is 08.01.2024.
    The course begins with a 3-day marathon from 09.11 to 11.11 at AVP Lecture Hall "Juniper," K3 Building, Konetekniikka 3. Afterward, regular sessions will be held on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The course culminates in a DEMO DAY (TBU) on 28th November at K3 Building, Konetekniikka 3.

    Finish the Pre-course Survey before you start the course.

    Before or Simultaneously:

    We recommend taking the 2-credit online course “Starting up” and/or the 1-credit online course "Entrepreneurship Essentials" alongside Startup Experience to further enrich your learning experience.

    Key objectives

    Startup Experience teaches students how to identify, explore, validate and develop product and business opportunities for scalable startups. 

    Course provides students both insight and experience in the entrepreneurial process by combining key aspects of entrepreneurship: 

    • Discovering business opportunities and creating customer value
    • Setting up and managing the organization to deliver the customer value
    The course is build on an experiential, hands-on process which provides exposes students (as far as possible) to real-world challenges and overcoming them using the entrepreneurial process. The course consists mostly of workshops and hands-on team assignments based on self-developed venture ideas.

    In this course students will be able to:

    1. To identify sustainable and scalable business opportunities
    2. To communicate the value of products and ventures
    3. To apply knowledge about marketing, user research, idea validation, experimentation and prototyping, and financial literacy for one s endeavor
    4. To work in and lead diverse teams 
    5. To work effectively with different tools for team working
    6. To take ownership and responsibility for one's own work
    7. To develop self-awareness and self-management skills, including time management and personal wellbeing
    8. To think outside the box and be more innovative
    9. To cope with challenge and know how to fail & pivot after having practiced resilience in a safe environment
    10. To critically assess products, business opportunities, and their effects through ethical and sustainable lenses

    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 are stories of teams those have gone through the experience together.

    To find out more about the course methodology and structure, please find the details in the following section:

    • Page icon
      Course introduction Page
    • File icon
      Startup Experience's Handbook File PDF

      Updated 28.01.24: Lab session

    • Forum icon
      Announcements Forum
    • Not available unless: You belong to L01 (SISU)
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      Prototype Budget and How to claim expenses Page

      Each team will have a maximum of 200 euro/team for prototyping cost. 

      Each team must have one person responsible for book keeping and doing all the purchases. This person will keep all receipts and file the report on NEO in order to claim the expenses. Here is the instructions for students how to create a profile and to use it https://www.aalto.fi/en/services/students-travel-grant-travel-arrangements-and-reimbursing-other-expenses. Also, the expense approval form should be submitted together with the expense report.  It is preferable that all costs are reported in one expense claim since we do not have the resources to check many small reports of 5, 10, 20 euros. 

      Click inside this page for more information on how to proceed and other basic guidelines (only for SE students) 

    • Not available unless: You belong to L01 (SISU)
      File icon
      Reimbursement Approval Form File PDF