Kellogg’s building block courses within the entrepreneurship program provide students with leadership skills that target specific areas of a business or industry.
Entrepreneurial Selling
Selling is a life skill. This course is designed as an adventure of discovery. You will be tested, taught and transformed through a series of lectures, discussions and exercises that are designed to push you up and out of your comfort zone. The biggest challenge to growing a successful entrepreneurial venture is selling. Entrepreneurs must build a strong sales pipeline to ensure profitable growth as they tackle other pressing issues like product development, staffing, infrastructure, and financing. In the Entrepreneurial Selling course, you will learn how to acquire and delight customers, use selling skills in different contexts, manage the entrepreneurial selling process, measure your success and use the key tools required for success in building a company. My goal with this course is to make you as efficient and effective in selling as possible, so that when you are spending time selling, not a moment is wasted. Why? Because as an entrepreneur (and a human), the way you spend your time determines success and failure. Period.
Entrepreneurial Tools for Digital Marketing
Most people agree that the Internet has been the single biggest challenge to business in the last 100 years, yet very few know how to effectively leverage the web as a tool for customer acquisition, retention and growth. The Entrepreneurial Tools for Digital Marketing course is based on the framework of the customer relationship funnel, focusing solely on the web/mobile channel. Customer discovery and validation in the web/mobile channel involves strategies and tactics that are faster and less expensive than physical channels. Consequently, digital marketing is an integral part of both the entrepreneurial and corporate environments. This class is very hands-on and tactical, providing students with exposure to the basic concepts of UI/UX, A/B testing, conversion funnels, SEO, SEM, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and much more. Students work in groups in practical settings and the course will include guest speakers.
Entrepreneurship: Building Innovation, Teams, and Cultures
Most venture capitalists agree that the key determinant of success in an early stage company is the management team. In an environment where formal business plans are of little help and ideation continues around the development of the right business model, management teams must be innovative, resourceful and adaptive. People – not plans – define outcomes. But attracting, coordinating and encouraging the right co-founders and employees is challenging, especially when facing scarce resources and deep uncertainty. This course explores the factors that define high-functioning teams and offers frameworks for assembling, motivating and coordinating effective teams in highly fluid and challenging contexts. Topics include the psychology of teams, legal aspects to team building, and how to divide responsibility, compensation and equity among founders. Culture is key to sustainable success in the face of evolving needs, crises and opportunities. The course leverages a powerful intent-driven framework designed to define and grow corporate cultures to create lasting value. The goal is a repeatable methodology for achieving a “flow state” of innovation, bringing together founders, employees, customers and investors to achieve extraordinary outcomes.
Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition
There are many paths to entrepreneurship, and one of those paths is through the acquisition of an existing company. This course will highlight aspects of strategy, finance, organizational behavior, marketing and other business disciplines through the context of acquiring and owning a small business. The course will outline pathways to entrepreneurship through acquisition, including search fund, independent sponsor, or through a CEO-in-Training program at a PE firm or a family business. The end goal is ownership of a company in the near future.
Intellectual Property for Entrepreneurs
This course equips entrepreneurs with the requisite knowledge to secure and leverage intangible, knowledge-based assets for their business. The course begins with a survey of various intellectual property forms for inventions, original expressions, source identifiers/brands, confidential information, etc., and how they can be used to build a unique selling proposition. Students explore the cost effective paths to registering these intangibles as patents, copyrights, trademarks, or securing trade secrets. Methods for leveraging IP ownership to realize investment and/or exit from the businesses are reviewed. Case studies explore entrepreneurship challenges in the electronics accessories, sound engineering and consumer durable contexts.
Introduction to Software Development
This course is geared to provide technical literacy for non-programmers who will be founders, employees, or consultants to "tech-enabled" organizations. This is a survey-style course that is very hands-on – students will learn the essentials of coding by creating websites and basic software applications that manipulate data and work across today’s platforms and devices.
Students will: • Build their own website and deploy it on a variety of platforms, including tablets and mobile devices, using modern web development tools and techniques • Achieve technical literacy with the JavaScript programming language and related open-source technologies, using it to build simple web and mobile applications • Gain exposure to open-source business initiatives from Facebook, Google, and other major contributors to the languages and frameworks shaping modern software development • Learn to manipulate and consume data with SQL and open-source data visualization libraries • Use both software and hardware APIs to integrate with commercial and open datasets, and to understand the current Internet of Things (IoT) landscape.
Startup Branding
There is a big difference between managing an existing brand and launching a new brand. In "Startup Branding," you will learn how to turn ideas into brands, with a specific focus on the importance of early branding decisions in new ventures and brand design execution with limited resources. The course is structured around a multi-week assignment in which student teams will design a new brand for a new venture. Course coverage includes brand strategy, brand design, the brand experience, launching the brand, and leading the brand. The course format is a blend of lecture, exercise, cross-team collaboration and ideation sessions, and guest speakers.
Product Management for Technology Companies: An Entrepreneurial Perspective
Product Managers are responsible for identifying unmet customer needs, orchestrating the development of products and solutions to address these needs, bringing new products to market and managing products as a business. In a technology startup, the Product Manager is typically a Founder. In mid-sized and large technology firms, the Product Manager is a middle manager who needs to manage products as a business. Product Management is a distinct discipline that will benefit Kellogg students who want to become technology entrepreneurs or students who are recruited by established technology companies for product management roles.