EIP: Entrepreneurship and Innovation Project

NOTE: The information and materials provided on these pages are preliminary and intended for information only. Final versions will be made available in early January 2025.

Overview

The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Project (EIP) teaches students how to develop a business value proposition for a tech innovation. Working in groups, students will ideate and design an innovative software and/or hardware product in an area of their choice, learn how to build a business proposition around this innovation, and produce a business plan for taking a new technology solution to market. 

This course teaches skills that are very different from those taught in other Informatics courses: Entrepreneurship involves understanding how one can create value through the development and productisation of new technology, navigating uncertainty when making choices about how to achieve this, and working closely with other people whose input you depend on. 

While students have to apply technical expertise they have acquired from other courses to build an actual demonstrator of their envisioned product, learning how to identify and understand the customer, developing a strategy and plan for taking a product to market, and putting together a business pitch that would convince others to invest in the vision requires stepping out of one's comfort zone for most people.

Entrepreneurial thinking is a valuable skill not only for people who are interested in creating a tech start-up in the future - you can apply it to any life situation that requires identifying a problem, finding a good solution for it, and convincing yourself and others that you have a plan for creating value by delivering this solution. 

Course Structure

Taking an entrepreneurial proposition from idea to business plan in 11 weeks is a challenging undertaking - in fact, most real entrepreneurs take many months or even years to get there. To provide the experiential learning environment needed to achieve this, the course is built around two three-hour long in-class sessions per week where most of the tasks involved can be accomplished through intensive, guided teamwork exercises. 

We will follow the highly structured, tried and tested Disciplined Entrepreneurship methodology that consists of 24 structured steps, each of which focuses on a particular activity that is key at the respective stage of the business value proposition process. Short lectures will introduce each of these tasks and provide materials students can use to structure their work in most weeks, but large blocks of time will also be allocated during which teams can work independently on ideation, technology development, and pitch development. 

In addition to this, a small part of the course provides a short introduction to understanding and producing financial statements, which are essential for creating financial plans for the business idea students will develop, and for scrutinising the basic financials of companies.

To make the overall task feasible, some elements of the entrepreneurial journey will be 'simulated' or omitted, for example finding co-founders, networking and fundraising, dealing with intellectual property, and developing a fully-fledged product. Invited guest lectures will cover some of these topics to provide students with fundamental knowledge of these areas, but we will not go into them in more depth.

Experiential Learning

EIP is a hands-on, 'learning by doing' course that involves fairly limited acquisition of theoretical knowledge. Most skills students will acquire will be the product of their own experiences from working together on a set of practical tasks, and attainment of these learning outcomes will be evidenced by the outputs students produce individually and as a group. The main assessed piece of work will be the business proposition web site and pitch presentation that capture the ideas project teams have developed, articulate the approach taken to turn these ideas into a business, and provide evidence and justification for the arguments it presents to support the viability of the proposition. On the technical side, what will be assessed is the process by which a team chose to demonstrate the feasibility of the envisioned product and how they worked together to produce it, rather than the quality of the software and/or hardware produced.

To document the individual learning experiences of each student - which naturally depends on the pathway taken by their individual work and that of their group - they will produce weekly blog posts that highlight a key reflection on different steps of the project work. At the end of the course, these reflections will be summarised in an essay that summarises the student's individual progress in terms of the key skills required by the course. The more quantitative and procedural skills around basic financial knowledge will be assessed by way of a take-home exam. 

If you are interested in this course, you might be also interested in the (extra-curricular) Startup Basics workshops offered by Edinburgh Innovations.