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Davidson College

Storytelling for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Davidson College via edX Professional Certificate

Overview

The Professional Certificate in Storytelling for Aspiring Entrepreneurs distills startup principles and the art of storytelling into a practical guide for aspiring startup entrepreneurs and corporate innovators.

Anyone can become a successful entrepreneur or corporate innovator by thoughtfully examining a business opportunity in a scientific manner while leveraging the power of storytelling to speak to the hearts of customers. Unlike most entrepreneurship and storytelling courses, this storytelling for entrepreneurs program is supercharged by weaving proven startup strategies with critical communication tools. This dynamic approach will allow you to cultivate and integrate the foundational human skill of storytelling to more powerfully and effectively reach customers. By harnessing these key insights, you’ll learn to create and transform your business idea into a new venture while increasing your probability for success. This experience is valuable for startup entrepreneurs and corporate innovators alike. Those interested in developing and commercializing their own ideas into a product or service will do so as a function of achieving the skills actively shared via this Professional Certificate.

By leveraging proven Lean Startup methodologies, the four week Jumpstart into Entrepreneurship course, will help you save time, money, and resources. Through the build-measure-learn framework, you will establish and continuously improve the effectiveness of new products, services and ideas quickly and cost effectively. Together we will create a cycle of creating and testing hypotheses by building a Minimum Viable Produce (MVP) for prospective customers to try early. Customers’ reactions to the initial version of your concept will provide valuable feedback, enabling you to learn from the results and subsequently iterate and improve your concept. By repeating this cycle, you will continuously improve your offering through intellectual honesty and informed decision making so that you eventually deliver precisely what your customers want and ultimately achieve product market fit.

At their core, the best businesses and entrepreneurs are storytellers. Great storytellers don’t sell products or services, they sell feelings and emotions. By becoming a great storyteller you will create an experience for customers to connect more deeply to your concept. The skill of storytelling will enable you to naturally sell experiences that prospective customers perceive in their mind and keep in their heart.

Through completion of the two courses included in this innovative program, you will gain a superpower, enabling you to implement best practices of communication in both written and verbal forms to become a more captivating, confident, and successful entrepreneur in order to bring your new concept into the hands of prospective customers or internal corporate stakeholders. Entrepreneurial storytelling takeaways include how to take a good story and make it a great story, a proven approach to tell an effective story and business story including tips for a good story, as you share your own story of your entrepreneurial journey from your own life with others, so that you can learn storytelling techniques from a business point of view.

The only prerequisite for this professional certificate is a growth mindset and willingness to try new things.

Syllabus

Courses under this program:
Course 1: Building a Lean Startup

Based on Eric Ries's influential book The Lean Startup , this course will bring your business idea to life with the help of time-tested tools and strategies employed by some of the world’s most successful startups.



Course 2: Applied Storytelling

In this interactive and dynamic course, you will learn how to establish and integrate the art of storytelling more powerfully into your career and everyday life.



Courses

Taught by

Steve Kaliski and Rebecca Weeks Watson

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