Proposed Course on Entrepreneurship

At present universities in Pakistan are producing graduates who are facing challenges in finding
suitable jobs due to the fact that economy is not creating enough jobs to accommodate these
graduates. Universities on the other hand have received generous funding for R&D and produced
laboratory level success in developing indigenous technologies. We need to develop and deliver
entrepreneurship coursework that trains students to convert these technologies into successful
business ventures. Thus, instead of looking for jobs these students will be able to offer jobs to
other graduates. Need of the hour is to develop a course on Entrepreneurship which can facilitate
business plan development of projects that have achieved success at laboratory level.

An outline has been developed for a course on entrepreneurship to fulfill above mentioned
requirements.

Fall Semester: 3.0 credits

3 one hour sessions per week
project based
Enrollment limited to 35

The Entrepreneur

This is an entrepreneurship course which in addition to meeting international standards for such
courses will impart skills to evaluate technologies developed in a university or a research and
development organization from the perspective of commercialization of the developed
technology and resulting business creation. The course will provide students hands on training
and an opportunity to analyze a successful laboratory scale technology from the perspective of its
commercialization.

The course teaches students how to:

 Evaluate commercialization potential of a given technology

o Identifying current value chains for the given technology

o Market potential estimation of these value chains

o key bottlenecks in expanding scope of these value chains

o Future possible value chains

 Challenges of commercial scale production and product distribution

 Creating distribution channels
 Identify potentially valuable opportunities.
 Obtain the resources necessary to pursue an opportunity and to create an entrepreneurial
organization.
  Manage the entrepreneurial organization once it has been established.
 Grow the business into a sustainable enterprise.
 Create and harvest value for the organization's stakeholders.

In order to have a productive experience students (individually, or with their team) must enter the
course with a specific lab level technical success (provided by university's R&D management)
they wish to explore. The course is not an appropriate vehicle for "coming up with" an idea.

Educational Objectives

This course will be market research and analysis based; students will be expected to conduct
both primary and secondary research to address an important question or set of questions related
to the development of the technology they have identified. Each student, either individually or as
a team, will frame a set of research questions relevant to the opportunity, gather and analyze data
appropriate to address those questions, draw conclusions and prepare a written opportunity
assessment based on the findings. This research might include one or more of the following: an
industry, competition, market or customer assessment.

Given that students must begin the course with a technology to be assessed in mind, the
following will prove a useful starting point:

 A description of the basic problem the technology is supposed to solve;

 An articulation of the questions surrounding this idea that the field study is designed to
explore;
 The analysis required to answer those questions;
 The data required to perform that analysis; and,
 An expectation of where that data will come from.

Course Content

This course will include periodic weekly classroom sessions for ALL students throughout the
semester. These sessions will serve as guideposts and milestones along the process of analyzing
the opportunity. Students must be comfortable discussing and presenting their ideas to the class.
Classroom sessions will include discussions related to idea generation and opportunity analysis,
research techniques (i.e. survey and interview protocol development). Deliverables will include a
paper. Students may work individually or in teams. Grading:

Class Participation (0); Intermediate work products (20%); formal class presentations on
business plan (20%); final Paper (20%). Quizzes and Presentations will constitute for the
remaining 40%.
The entrepreneur course will be tailor made to fit the requirements for each engineering or
business discipline. Some of the areas which can be added to the course could be as follows and
will be added as second stream i.e. the theoretical stream to the main course:

 Building and sustaining a successful enterprise

 Entrepreneurial finance

 Entrepreneurial leadership: Past, Present and Future

 Building Business in the Context of a Life

 Commercializing Science - Entrepreneurial Leadership in Turbulent times

 Entrepreneurial Management in a Turn around Environment

 Understanding entrepreneurial management

 Building Green Business

 Entrepreneurship and Innovation shaped by crises

 Evaluating the Entrepreneurial Opportunity

 Healthcare Technology Entrepreneurship : A hands on Experience

 Innovating in Healthcare

 Founder’ Dilemmas

 Growing, Financing, and Managing Family and Closely Held Firms

 International entrepreneurship

 Managing Innovation

 The online economy: Strategy and Entrepreneurship

 Managing and Growing Business

 New creative ventures

 Technology ventures
 New ventures development

 The New Revolution: Social entrepreneurship in the 21st century

 Financing the entrepreneurial business

The course will culminate in presentations to panels of investors and successful entrepreneurs
accustomed to assessing entrepreneurial opportunities.

We will have two parallel streams in the course. One stream that will be the first to begin will be
on topics I have given on page 1 about technology evaluation. Lectures on this should be done
in 2 to 3 weeks. Students will be presented a list of technologies that have shown laboratory
level success on day 1 of the course. By the end of third week students would have selected the
technology, created the team and start the project. This will be the practical stream fo the course.