Please note the prerequisites for this course at the bottom of the course description.
Note: this course is only for U.S.E. students. For non-U.S.E. students, see ECMSE (7.5 ECTS).
It is a required elective of the Business Development and Entrepreneurship master, but it also fits well in the International Management master. If you are a student of BF, FM or EP and you consider choosing this course, please contact the coordinator.
Entrepreneurship focuses on identifying new opportunities for creating value for customers or users and commercially developing those opportunities to establish a profitable business.
Sustainable entrepreneurship combines the traditional focus of entrepreneurship with an emphasis on opportunities to alleviate social or environmental conditions. Sustainable entrepreneurship is about entrepreneurs striving simultaneously for profit and for improving local and global environmental and social conditions.
This course is addressed to students interested in exploring the challenges of sustainable entrepreneurship. The course will provide academic and practical insights into the entrepreneurial process and in particular:
• The opportunities and challenges of developing a new venture, given characteristics of the market and the institutional context;
• The challenges of aligning profits with social and environmental value;
The overall objective of this course is to make the students aware of the opportunities offered by an entrepreneurial career, the skills needed for and academic knowledge about entrepreneurial processes, in the context of sustainability. The course emphasizes the business & management perspectives to entrepreneurship.
Learning objectives
This course is designed to provide academic knowledge related to idea development, value proposition, market introduction and management of new sustainable business and to put these into practice. The major learning objectives include:
• To provide understanding of (sustainable) entrepreneurship (what entrepreneurship is, cognitive foundations of entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial opportunities, distinctive characteristics of entrepreneurs);
• To analyse and evaluate the economic sources of social and environmental problems and to identify opportunities to alleviate or eliminate these problems and the underlying conditions;
• To apply the accumulated knowledge by either developing a business model from scratch or by introducing an initially developed plan to the market by means of bootstrapping methods.
This necessitates that students understand the concepts of sustainability and sustainable entrepreneurship, and that students learn about the economic, environmental and social problems facing local and global communities and recognise the opportunities that arise from this. Finally, students should be able to evaluate the risks and rewards of undertaking sustainable entrepreneurship, which involves finding ways to measure the economic as well as social and environmental risks and rewards of a new venture.
Format
This course is an interactive and participatory course that teaches students the key concepts from theory to practice. It adopts a mix of lectures, tutorial sessions, workshops and activities related to the business model assignment. Students are expected to attend and participate in all lectures and take part in all tutorial sessions. The students will be allocated into groups (4 or 5 students) for the business model assignment. The aim is to establish a mix of students from various disciplines (this course coincides with ECMSE for master students Geosciences and other disciplines).
The elements that constitute the final grade are the following:
Business Model Assignment (group work):
Groups will either develop a business model from scratch, or introduce developed ideas to the market. This will be achieved in several steps throughout the course. The evaluation will be based on the quality of the final work, the presentation and the process towards the final document(s). Ideas developed in earlier courses (for instance in the track Business Development & Entrepreneurship: Research Project & Entrepreneurial Marketing) may be used as a starting point, as long as they fit with the contents of the course.
Written Exam (individual work):
There will be a midterm exam that consists of open-ended questions. The questions are based on the key course concepts that are taught and discussed during the course.
Assessment method
• Written midterm exam with open-ended questions (35%, individual)
• Evaluation of business model assignment (65%). Group grade, with a group component (50%) and an individual component (15%).
Prerequisites
None. Course is eligible to all students.
In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN number. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.
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