Summary
The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Project course enables Informatics students to approach real life problems with an entrepreneurial perspective, through developing their ability to apply disciplinary knowledge, resources and academic skills. The teaching environment for the EIP course will be in-person, face-to-face, with a core teaching facilitator who organises the weekly lesson plans, the guest lecturers, and who serves as a facilitator and introducer of weekly learning. Teaching will be delivered in a way that enables students to build on their entrepreneurial knowledge each week through formal and informal interactions with the course
organiser.
Course Description
The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Project covers three levels of cognitive domains (Knowledge, Comprehension, and Application): it exposes the enrolled students to entrepreneurial knowledge, and then teaches them how to explain and represent their new knowledge through applying it to constructing a solution to a problem that they have identified. Students will be assessed on their ability to develop and execute a semester-long project and team management plan. On a weekly basis, each individual in the team will be required to reflect on/provide a personal perspective of the effectiveness of their teamwork. Like a real-life business with co-founders, the EIP course requires students face and address challenges as a team.
Student teams will be provided with formative assessment throughout the semester on the basis of their contributions to weekly reflective exercises, which evaluate their progress on collaboratively planning for and presenting a group business plan as their final project. All students will be required to attend weekly business planning workshops, which will guide students on how to research for and populate sections of their business plans that will be assessed as a summative portfolio of each team's collaborative learning journey throughout the semester. Weekly class attendance and effective team work are both essential in order for students to get a good grade for EIP.
The EIP course provides students with an opportunity to define and engage with an entrepreneurial project that they can continue pursue beyond the 1-semester of the EIP course delivery.
The course organiser of EIP will provide students with a guided learning pathway, which enables the teaching team (organiser and tutors) to get to know the individual teams 'intimately' through the semester, so as to offer them individualised/team-specific feedback within the context of the larger learning outcomes and with regard to the components of the business plan that are assessed for a final team and individual grade.
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this course, students should be able to:
- identify appropriate market segments for their innovations and justify decision to choose one market over another
- communicate the process through which they achieve their final product to stakeholders
- differentiate and appraise the different aspects of business models, financial plans and customer channels
- collaboratively construct a business plan and model associated financial statements (for their entrepreneurial idea)
- work as a member of a team to demonstrate multidisciplinary application of their Informatics' knowledge and skills to delivering an entrepreneurial solution
