Half-Course: Evaluating the Entrepreneurial Opportunity

Course Number 1615

Senior Lecturer Michael J. Roberts
Fall, 1.5 credits
Paper(on an assigned topic)
Enrollment: Limited to 25. Note that a separate, full course version of this course is offered as #6626, a Field Study Seminar, in which students complete a project on their new venture idea.

Career Focus

This half course is designed for students who have an idea for a new business and wish to better understand the process for evaluating such entrepreneurial opportunities. The course is targeted to those students who believe they may seriously consider an entrepreneurial opportunity early in their careers, although it is hoped that the skills developed will prove valuable at any juncture.

This course will be especially helpful to students who plan to develop a business plan in the second semester, as part of another course or in conjunction with the Business Plan Competition. In order to have the most productive experience, students (individually, or with their team) should have a general idea of a business opportunity that they wish to explore. The course is not an appropriate vehicle for "coming up with" an idea.

NOTE: Students with a specific idea who wish to spend the second half of the semester actually performing an in-depth opportunity evaluation / field study should consider enrolling in the Field Study Seminar, Evaluating the Entrepreneurial Opportunity. This half course differs from that full course in that this half course explores - in a classroom setting - the concepts and tools of opportunity analysis, as well as the techniques for structuring such an analysis, but does NOT include actually performing a full-blown opportunity analysis itself. The students enrolled in that full course will attend the same set of classroom sessions as those students in this half course, but the project component will be much richer and more in-depth.

Educational Objectives

This half course will focus on the criteria used to gauge venture attractiveness, the kind of research that can be done to assess opportunities, and how these opportunities can best be conveyed to investors and partners. With respect to their own idea, students will both frame a set of research questions relevant to the opportunity, and also describe the analysis that would underpin a thorough investigation.

Given that students must begin the course with a business idea in mind, the following is an overview of what the required paper should cover:

• A description of the basic business idea;
• 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 and Organization

This half course will include weekly classroom sessions for ALL students that will serve as guideposts to the opportunity analysis process. Students will also be required to attend smaller group working sessions. 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 (on an assigned topic).