EIP: Week-4

Entrepreneurship & Innovation Project 2024

Week-4: Tuesday, 6th February & Thursday, 8th February

Week-4 of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Project course will further expand on financial statement (as introduced in week-3) by expanding on the theme Direct Cost of Sales (Profit and Loss) within the context of the Altman Z-Score for Calculating Bankruptcy (and application of Z-Score in a wide range of contexts); Understanding Macro Financial Implications for Entrepreneurship; creating Software for hardware Prototypes.

EIP Week-4 Summary

Learning Outcomes 2 and 5: Innovation and Design Thinking in terms of Potential/Prospective Markets; Introduction to Intellectual Property (Design Thinking); and Understanding Financial Statements.

Key Themes for Week-4:

• Financial Statements continued

• Understanding Macroeconomic Financial implications for entrepreneurship

• Understanding Direct Cost of Sales & Altman Z-Score for Calculating Bankruptcy

• How much did the product or service cost to produce?

• How much Profit did the company make from having used resources to sell the product/service? Did they make a profit or loss? What is a good profit?

• What is the income gained from selling the product once all other costs (per product) that went to paying for variables such as marketing, human resources, materials, contractors and other suppliers are deducted from the money taken in from making a sale?

Student Assignment for Week-4:

Students provide a reflective Blog on Innovating as Part of a Team in-terms of Challenges and Opportunities for self-knowledge.

Hardware and Software Labs for Week-4:

• Tuesday Lab: Guest Speaker on Soul of New Machine and History of Software and Hardware Entrepreneurship.

• Thursday Lab 1: Altman Z-Score Data Manipulation and Analysis for Financial Statements.

• Thursday Lab 2: Reflections on Hardware from "The Soul of A New Machine" ; & Pi Picos with rotary angle sensors and buzzers.

Key Readings for Week-4:

1. Disciplined Entrepreneurship, Pages 69-90

   1. Profile a Persona for the Beachhead Market

   2. Understanding Full Life Cycle Use Case

2. Development As Freedom, Page 146-188

   1. Economic Needs and Political Freedoms

   2. Constructive Role of Political Freedom

   3. The Practice of Democracy

   4. Famines and Other Crises

   5. Protective Role of Democracy

3. Soul of a New Machine, Pages 140-163

   1. Be Wary of Your Competitors (Chapter 8)

   2. Workshop Your Business Ideas (Chapter 9)

4. Edward Altman Z-Score

   1. Applications of distress prediction models: What have we learned after 50 years from the Z-Score models?, by Edward I. Altman, 2018.      
       

5. Business Case Study for Week 4

   1. Balance sheet analysis: Apple, a Video by Michael McDonald, 2020.

   2. Business classics: the role of design in business success of Apple Computer, by Walsh Sanderson, S. and Yi-Nung Peng, 2001.

   3. Financial decision-making in a high-growth company: The case of Apple incorporated, by J. Nicolás Marín  Ximénez and Luis J. Sanz, 2014.