Foundations of Entrepreneurship and Business Development

Course goals

Learning objectives
This course introduces you to the economic foundations of the field of entrepreneurship and new business development. The skills and knowledge acquired in this course are useful if you want to  found a new venture, join a startup in a non-founder role, manage entrepreneurial processes in established organisations, or stimulate business development in a policy role.
At the end of the course, you:

• Can explain the incentives that underpin entrepreneurial decision-making and behaviour, including entrepreneurial career transitions;
• Can explain the impact entrepreneurs have on the economy as a whole;
• Can identify entrepreneurial opportunities and evaluate their potential for value creation and capture;
• Understand the foundations of entrepreneurial strategy, and apply common strategy frameworks and modes of action in a realistic context;
• Can integrate theoretical knowledge and empirical research findings covered in the course to critically assess new business cases;
• Can assess the merit of scholarly work in the field of entrepreneurship and distil practical and theoretical implications from original research articles.

Content

Standard business and management frameworks focus on creating and capturing value through a linear process of targeting, positioning, product development, pricing, distribution, promotion, and monitoring. However, in entrepreneurship—the pursuit of novel opportunities under high uncertainty and with limited resources—this structured approach often fails, as businesses, particularly start-ups, struggle to identify and develop value-creating opportunities within such rigid frameworks. Instead, entrepreneurs must adopt more flexible strategies that emphasise understanding opportunities and effective methods for evaluating them.

Since entrepreneurship is a key driver of innovation and economic growth, entrepreneurs and business developers need to determine how they can successfully create and capture value despite constraints on the strategic options they can explore. As such, the field of entrepreneurship revolves around the fundamental questions of how, by whom, and with what consequences opportunities to create new goods and services are discovered, evaluated, and exploited. This course intends to cover several aspects of these questions – the individual entrepreneur, the opportunity recognition process, entrepreneurial strategy, entrepreneurs as agents of innovation, and the role of the entrepreneur in the economy. While this course adapts mainly an economics perspective, characteristic to the field of entrepreneurship is that valuable answers have been provided by various disciplines, including sociology and psychology. In this course you will explore the merit of these disciplinary answers to an inherently interdisciplinary filed.

The course integrates the real-world perspective through case-based learning, experiential projects, and guest lectures by entrepreneurs and business developers, enabling students to apply theoretical frameworks to real-world business challenges. By engaging with empirical research, market trends, and real life examples, students develop practical skills for opportunity recognition, strategic decision-making, and business development in dynamic environments.

Format
The course includes interactive lectures and tutorials. Beyond theory, examples will be offered and exercises done to familiarize with all the concepts. In the tutorials you practice with some of the core frameworks and theories through the discussion and analysis of real business cases.

In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.