Entrepreneurship: From Idea to Early Design

This intensive course takes an applied, practical approach to the development, testing, and validation of customer or community-driven product solutions. By learning and applying contemporary design-thinking concepts and tools, students generate innovative solutions to important customer or community problems. During the program, students identify and define a major problem to be solved, work with real customers to better understand the problem from their perspective, generate multiple solutions, then choose a solution to test with real customers. Students acquire practical knowledge and tools focusing on the development, testing, and validation of new products that solve real customer problems and needs, from idea to early product development.

Students can expect to learn how to:

• identify and articulate customer problems in an accurate way, reflecting how individuals truly experience the problem and its challenges
• create effective customer surveys to help validate your assumptions on customer problems (pain points), solutions, and benefits (expected outcomes)
• assess current solutions provided in the marketplace in order to build on best practices as well as identify gap areas
• develop a minimal viable product in order to gain additional feedback on specific solution features
• measure and validate customer needs fulfillment or social impact assumptions
• develop a solution (business or social enterprise) model to test your assumptions about customer interests, acceptance, and use

In-Person participants are expected to bring laptops for this class.