• Be able to identify the various elements of an entrepreneurial strategy and address how these are linked.
• Account for how to identify the right customers and form a formal strategy for addressing such customers.
• Be able to assess various technologies as the appropriate ones for a given opportunity and make a coherent choice as to the identified customers.
• Explain what a startup identity is and how the entrepreneurs should proceed in creating a sensible identity for the firm.
• provide an assessment of the important organizational choices a startup needs to make in the early stages
• Make comparative judgments across entrepreneurial strategies and assess their relative strengths and weaknesses.
• Describe various forms of leadership for small teams and account for the dis(advantages) of each of these forms of leaderships.

Course Description:

High tech entrepreneurs face a number of choices from the very beginning of their new business endeavors. Making these choices in the blind may lead to inefficiencies and incoherent behavior even within a relatively narrow scope of activities which can have major implications for the startups overall performance. Determining and understanding the decision landscape as well as making coherent and consistent choices is at the very heart of starting and running a business. As a potential investor in start-ups, it is also of the outmost importance to assess whether a newly established firm is pursuing a strategy that is sensible and coherent with the identified goals.  Like established firms, startups benefit greatly from forming a strategy. But the strategizing for small firms differs somewhat from that of the more established firms. Fundamentally the course presents the perspectives that a subset of key choices cannotbe left to happenstance. 

This course provides an actionable framework for aspiring and already active entrepreneurs, which can help them make better and the right coherent choices with regard to establishing and growing their business. 

Course Contents:

The course starts by addressing why entrepreneurs really need a strategy and identifying the dimensions of an entrepreneurial strategy. 

The course will highlight four dimensions, which should be addressed in an entrepreneurial strategy: 1) identifying the right customers from the beginning, 2) choosing the appropriate technology, 3) choosing the organization, and 4) forming the entrepreneurial strategy by chosing the competition or choosing not to compete. The approach also covers a set of four archetype strategies which may be used as a guidance for undersstaindg the start-up's positioning and early choices. INdeed, it wil be argued that most high-tech startups may be established in various ways with the aim of converting value creation into value capture. Furthermore, the course includes a section which discusses how entrepreneurial firms can be lead in various ways and how various forms of leadership in small teams may produce different (dis)advantages.