Overview

This course will introduce you to entrepreneurship for global challenges in emerging markets. You will get to know other like-minded entrepreneurs around you, and discover how institutions in your target region are working on innovation and entrepreneurship.

As an entrepreneur in an emerging economy, you may be faced with many challenges that need to be solved. These might include scarcity of fossil fuels, climate change or water, food and health security. This Delft University of Technology course will provide you with examples from partner universities and affiliated entrepreneurs in emerging economies which explain the opportunities and obstacles that they faced as they established themselves and created value.

You will acquire a set of practical tools which will enable you to discover the opportunities in your own environment and how these can be used to make an actual change! You will learn how to rethink your value proposition with your own case study, or with one we provide.

After the course, you will be able to develop your value proposition more quickly by getting to know your customers and partners better and understand local values and institutions. You will have the opportunity to get to know a network of innovators and entrepreneurs in which you can – during and after the MOOC – share your experiences and perhaps even team up to start a business.

Syllabus

Week 1:
We will introduce you to the structure of the Delft Global Approach of the course and the Global Development Themes. From here you will study in-depth the global challenges for emerging economies. Here we would like to have input from you so we know what you perceive as global challenges for your region or for your region of interest.

Week 2:
We start to work on opportunity framing and ideation. You will discover how opportunities arise from the challenges that we discussed the previous week. You will get the tools to formalize your ideas and you will select one of them to continue working with. We expect you to share your ideation process and contribute to the forum. There will be a short quiz on the lecture material.

Week 3:
You will test your value proposition by going outside and interviewing others. As lecture material you will be given case studies of successes and failures of knowledge institutes and entrepreneurs. You can use this input, together with the interviews, in a short customer mapping assignment in which you describe the main obstacles that others mentioned and how you can overcome them. You will upload your drawing of your customer mapping. With input from others, we will now look at how to start working with partners and customers.

Week 4:
You will start to look at the (internal) business culture and (external) relations with partners and customers. Relations in emerging economies vary from region to region. But in general, trust in and cooperation with business partners and customers cannot be taken for granted. Case studies will give various examples on how business partners and relations were set-up and maintained.

Week 5:
You will continue to work on your selected idea, and define the internal management style in the context of local values and institutions. What cultural/institutional obstacles and opportunities can you identify in your region or region of interest? We expect from you to contribute by uploading a mood board about your own way of managing your business/proposition.

Week 6:
You will identify creative revenue models and cost estimations for your case study. Also, in the final days of this MOOC we will evaluate and discuss the suitable follow-up steps for your current value proposition: what you would need to start, and the first steps that you will take to create that impact with your value proposition. You will be asked to upload a summary of the past 6 weeks to Sketchdrive and review the course.