An intensive 5-day course of entrepreneurship taught by Professor Bart Huisken was filled with lots of learnings and mistakes – giving the class of International MBA a hands-on experience in venturing and lean start-up methodology.
Bart said he wanted to push us so that we got a taste of what it really takes to start your own business. The following insights from my classmates are a testament that Bart was serious.
The course was “a good opportunity to challenge yourself and push to the next level the creativity, hard work and team cohesion”. – Andrea Castro (Chile), MBA 2023 participant
The entire module consisted of developing a startup idea centered around three sustainable development goals (SDGs) from the UN, namely Good Health and Wellbeing, Quality Education and Responsible Consumption and Production. Hence, the 8 teams of the MBA class came up with an idea within a day, and during the entire course, carried out interviews to learn the underlying components of customer discovery. Furthermore, each team built a business model and a minimum viable product and finally fought tooth and nail for the investors’ money. The most exciting thing of the course was to present a convincing 6 minute pitch to the investors who were to evaluate our ideas and analyse if it is worth funding.
“An amazing experience where you look into entrepreneur life and the challenges and setbacks they face which made them more resilient towards the journey.” – summarizes Sumit Negi (India), MBA 2023 participant.
The Key Learning Takeaways from the course
The value of your idea
Prof. Bart started challenging us with two questions:
How valuable is your idea?
You might have an idea that you built upon an existing concept, or you encountered a day-to-day life problem for which you have a perfect solution. However, “the most brilliant idea, with no execution is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20000000.” – Derek Sivers, president and programme, CD Baby and HostBaby. A sentiment shared by many others, such as Steve Jobs who said “To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.”
If your idea is valuable, will you share it with others?
Ideas float around because there are potential customers. Moreover, having people with similar and competing ideas just validates that there is a market. But if you execute it badly, you lose a lot of money and time. In fact, it would be good to share your business idea with people and take valuable feedback so that you can improve your offering that actually resolves the pain points of the customers. Moreover, with the feedback from people, you execute it better.
The 12 steps of the entrepreneurial process:
1. Self-reflection
2. Idea generation
3. Idea or opportunity? Solving a problem? Understanding disruption
4. Stakeholders, initial team / co-founders, mentorship, advisors
5. Customer discovery, MVP, Lean Canvas
6. Building a product, detail the Business model canvas
7. Board, governance
8. Financing
9. Hiring, motivating talent
10. Delegation, growth
11. Internationalization
12. “Exit”, continue or close
Before starting your venture, it is important to understand the entrepreneurial process. Most entrepreneurs skip many steps. They build a product, get some financing and end up not going anywhere. They end up wasting 2 or 3 of their valuable years. Each step produces its own results that help in the future success of your start-up.
The 3 principles of the Lean Startup methodology
Among the top 20 reasons for why start-ups fail, most are related to product-market fit and business model.
“Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.”- Steve Blank
The lean start-up framework has taken momentum in the start-up world today where ventures try to improve their chances of success by following the lean methodology. It involves building hypotheses about your product or business and then validating it by getting deep insights from customers. During this process, a start-up looks for a business model that works. Based on the feedback, if the hypothesis is proved wrong, the start-up either revises or pivots to new hypotheses.
The key 3 principles of lean method are:
Experimentation – Building hypotheses rather than business model
Measure customer’s feedback – Getting constant customer feedback to test assumptions and then create a minimum viable product
Agile Development – Quick and interactive product development cycles. It works conjointly with customer development and saves time and resources by rapidly redesigning/fine-tuning the product based on customer needs.
Lastly, the 3 key ingredients for a business to be successful are:
The right people who have the skills and passion for the project
Make something that customers really want
Have an efficient business model and waste as little money as possible
All three ingredients are very hard to have, nonetheless doable. Most companies fail at one of these.
Overall, the entrepreneurship course was an engaging and immersive experience and there was so much more to learn than just the key takeaways mentioned in this article. My classmate Ya-Ting Wang (Taiwan) described this experience as “Inspiring and brain draining at the same time”.
It developed our entrepreneurial skills, helped with business planning, provided ample network opportunities, offered a real-world experience and encouraged innovation. Moreover, feedback from the investors was very valuable as it provided essential insights needed to steer the business idea in the right direction.
A highly recommended course if someone is interested in starting their own businesses or pursuing careers in entrepreneurship.
Written by
Bhavya Swaroop
Participant of International MBA, class of 2023
About Bhavya
A curious mind, critical thinker and a driven individual, Bhavya Swaroop is currently pursuing an International MBA. She graduated with a Bachelor's degree in English Literature in 2016. She has worked in a market research company where she was in charge of sales, content and constant innovation of a Spanish platform for customers. She has a keen interest in sustainable businesses and is looking forward to creating, leading and promoting sustainability initiatives. In her free time, she loves to go out and discover new places and experiences in Barcelona, read fiction and work on her novel.
Feel free to contact Bhavya with any questions regarding the International MBA: bswaroop@eada.net
