Technology Entrepreneurship

Startup Engineering: How to build a startup

andreas baetz, pixabay, cc0

Credits

6 ECTS module
2 courses Entrepreneurship & Creation of Business Opportunities

Target Audience

Engineering Masters, Erasmus & NTW (Betrieb & Management, 2 * 2 ECTS)
IWI, LIM & GTIME students please refer to this course
(duplicated because of capacity contraints)

Instructor(s)

Dr. Hannes W. Lampe

Overview

Startups are temporary, team-based organizations, which can form independently, but also within established companies. They pursue one central objective: taking a business idea to market by finding and designing a repeatable and scalable business model. This entrepreneurial process involves gathering and combining resources that you do not (yet) possess and dealing with high uncertainty about what combinations of resources actually generate value. This course module is designed to introduce students to a systematic Startup Engineering approach to master the process of taking a business idea to market in light of resource contraints and uncertainty.

Startup Engineering takes an iterative approach, in that it favors variety and alternatives over one detailed, linear five-year business plan to reach steady state operations. From a problem solving and systems thinking perspective, Startup Engineers create different possible versions of a new venture and alternative hypotheses about value creation for customers and value capture vis-à-vis competitors. To test critical hypotheses early on, Startup Engineers engage in an evidence-based, experimental trial-and-error learning process that measures real progress.

The workflow in this course module is comprised of three elements:

(Flipped) classroom: learning about and discussing concepts and tools currently prevailing in theory and practice of modern technology entrepreneurship.
Problem-based learning: deepen an understanding of the concepts and tools by seeing them applied and applying them to real company cases.
Experiential learning: applying the concepts and tools in teams to an own new startup project.

Students are invited to apply to this course module already with a startup idea and/ or team, but this is not a requirement. We will form teams and ideas in the beginning of the course.

Objectives

Upon completion of this course module, students will be able to:

Apply a modern innovation toolkit relevant in both the startup & corporate world
Analyze business opportunities in terms of its constituent elements
Design new business models by gathering and combining relevant ideas, facts and information
Evaluate business opportunities and derive judgment about next steps & decisions

This course module can prepare student for the following career paths:

Startup founder
Early employee in a startup
New business development in established corporations
Venture capital investing

Grading ¹

40% (team): Development and pitch of an own startup project
35% (team): Case solutions submitted in/after class
15% (individual): Three case memos submitted before class
10% (individual): Class participation

Registration

Open from April 6th until April 18th on e-learning.tuhh.de/studip

Time & Location

Entrepreneurship: Monday, 13.00 - 14.30, Buidling M, Room 0526
Creation of Business Opportunities: Monday, 15.00 - 17.30, Buidling M, Room 1582

As long as the current situation stands, physical meetings will be replaced by online and video conference sessions to which registered participants will receive access in due time.

Course Notes & Materials

Access to course notes & materials here.

Preliminary Schedule

Session	Date	Topic
1	April 20th	Introduction
2	April 27th	Customer Segmentation
3	May 4th	Business Model Design
4	May 11th	Revenue Models & Pricing
5	May 18th	Market Sizing & Competition Analysis
6	May 25th	Lean Startup & Experimentation
-	June 1st	Pfingsten Holiday
7	June 8th	Intermediate Pitches
8	June 15th	Marketing
9	June 22th	Sales
10	June 29th	Scaling Operations
11	July 6th	Financial Projections
12	July 13th	Final Startup Pitches
13	July 20th	Submission of Final Pitch Deck

Master students enrolled in the entire module are graded based on all four components. NTW (Betrieb & Management) students enrolled in 2 ECTS are graded based on the startup project, students enrolled in 4 ECTS are graded based on the startup project and case solutions. ↩︎