1. Curriculum
Personal Development Journey: Global Leadership Skills
Module I: INSPIRE
Start-up Bootcamp
The objective of this course is learning about your own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the fuzzy front-end of starting up a business as well as learning to use several tools to identify good business ideas and develop them into interesting business opportunities. You will (hopefully) learn to see opportunities where others only see chaos.
Creative Thinking
In this course, participants will develop an understanding of how to boost individual and collective creativity and get an appreciation of why so many companies look at creativity as an important strategic capability, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Technologies of Tomorrow
Part I: The technologies of tomorrow we’re confronted with every day often sound like a buzzword bingo: blockchain, artificial intelligence, deep learning, Internet of Things, etc. The aim of this module is to provide a clear understanding of what they are and how they can have an impact on your business.
Part II: This part of the module will be built around technology sourcing and intellectual property management. Not purely from the protection point of view, but combined with open source discussion, collaboration agreements and creativity techniques based on patents. We will also look at how the technologies of tomorrow are entering the intellectual property business (the rise of blockchain, NFT’s, AI, …).
Module II: BUILD
Advanced Finance for Innovation
This course provides students with the minimum required expertise to plan and model a start-up from a financial perspective and to understand how to raise funds from professional investors. Students learn business valuation techniques, investment criteria, financial modelling, and the main and most important concepts of corporate finance. The main goal is to help students to effectively present a business idea to professional investors and to understand a fund-raising process.
Entrepreneurial Strategy
The course is structured to provide a deep understanding of the core strategic choices facing start-up and corporate innovators. It draws on a rapidly emerging body of research in entrepreneurial strategy combined with entrepreneurship research conducted by AMS that moves beyond the “one size fits all” approaches to start-ups (e.g. lean start-up) and instead focuses on the key choices that founders face as they start and develop their business.
Corporate Entrepreneurship
This course is designed to provide students with both fundamental and practical knowledge about corporate entrepreneurship. This obtained knowledge is important in real-world business settings in two ways. First, for (aspiring) entrepreneurs as it addresses the challenge of and provides how to remain entrepreneurial once ventures mature. Second, those that seek careers in established organizations or incumbents gain key insights into why and how corporate entrepreneurship can improve firm performance.
Business Design Thinking
This course makes innovators aware of the many assumptions on which core strategic choices along the way are based upon and offers tools to validate these assumptions. Validated assumptions offer the opportunity to make better decisions when developing solutions. In addition, our innovation sprint in collaboration with Poli.Design in Milan is part of this course.
Module III: GROW
Digital Marketing
This course acknowledges all forms of marketing - be it offline (e.g. billboard advertising, newspaper ads) or online (e.g. keywords advertising, social commerce). Yet, the course sets a strong focus on digital marketing because (i) marketing channels are intertwined in Omni channel strategies, (ii) digital marketing is offering strong potential for growth and (iii) traditional channels are enhanced through digital technology (e.g. a personalized billboard ad).
Entrepreneurial Selling
This course brings (future) entrepreneurs the latest best practice on how to sell their ideas and influence customer behavior. In this course, we go “inside” the psychology of persuasion to understand how and why it works. We focus on the techniques that entrepreneurs use to design compelling messages and explore why some messages are more persuasive than others.
Growth Strategy
The course focuses on how to scale your idea. It gives a deeper insight into the growth obstacles that companies face when they are scaling their ideas. The course supports students in designing successful growth strategies to overcome these growth challenges. Finally, it includes an international trip to an inspiring entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Master Project
You will be working on an in-company project (a venture building project) or on your own start-up for eight months. Whatever you choose, you will directly put theory into practice: Throughout these eight months you will be investigating and challenging the potential of business ideas by transforming them in real business cases, including a market research, a product-market fit business model, a sound financial plan and ambitious go-to market strategy.
Note: Curriculum is subject to change, depending on the evolution of the Covid pandemic.