How to Start Your Own Business Specialization
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Beginner Level
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Approx. 8 months to complete
How to Start A Business. In this course you will actually start a business and demystify the business creation process.
This specialization is a guide to creating your own business. We will cover a progression of topics necessary for successful business creation including: mindset, ideation, planning, action and strategy. Rather than just describing what to do, the focus will be on guiding you through the process of actualy doing it. The Capstone course will bring all of the tools and lessons discussed together for you to launch your business. It may not be the business of your dreams, but it will be a functional business giving you the execution capability to start something you are passionate about.
How to Finance and Grow Your Startup – Without VC
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Beginner Level
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Approx. 26 hours to complete
Access all lectures, readings, and assignments for free
If you’re an entrepreneur at any stage of your journey, or even an aspiring one, and you need money to start or grow your business, this course is for you.
This course will introduce, and help you put to use in your startup, the five models through which your customers can – and will, if you ask them! – fund your business. These five time-tested models have been put to use by entrepreneurial superstars like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and more. Sadly, though, the five models are rarely talked about and not widely understood. Until now! The five models will be brought to life by the real-world stories of an inspiring collection of incredibly creative entrepreneurs from around the world – including successes and failures – through a series of captivating no-holds-barred interviews with founders and others, and investors, too.
More than two generations ago, the venture capital community – VC’s, business angels, incubators, and others – convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. They did so for very good reasons: the sometimes astonishing returns they’ve delivered to their investors and the incredibly large and valuable companies their ecosystem has created. But the vast majority of fast growing companies never take any angel or venture funding. Are they onto something that most of today’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has missed? Indeed, should a business angel or VC be seen as the first port of call for getting your nascent entrepreneurial venture off the ground or growing it faster? Perhaps not.
You’ll be asked to do a series of exercises – out in the real world – to put your growing toolkit to use in your business or the one you hope to start. Hands-on, practical tools to help your business start and thrive – without venture capital. You’ll join our discussion board of fellow participants, if you like, and learn from others who are putting the tools to work, just as you are. And to suit today’s fast-paced lifestyles, we’ve broken what you’ll get – short lessons, interviews, thought-provoking questions, even some optional things to read – into bite-sized chunks, so you can log in and grab them whenever and wherever you are.
If, after checking out and perhaps completing this course, you find your company in a position where seeking venture capital turns out to be the right thing to do next, John Mullins leads an inspiring and hands-on executive education course at London Business School – this one face-to-face – called Financing the Entrepreneurial Business. There, among a room full of investors and entrepreneurs, you’ll study a series of captivating real-world cases and learn everything an entrepreneur – or an investor, for that matter – needs to know to handle the person who sits across the deal table and take an entrepreneurial business from start-up to exit.
English for Business and Entrepreneurship
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Beginner Level
No prior experience required.
Approx. 30 hours to complete
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This course is designed for non-native English speakers who are interested in learning more about the global business economy. In this course, you will learn about topics and language necessary to succeed in the international workplace. You will explore business English through authentic readings and video lectures, while learning about business vocabulary, concepts, and issues. Unit 1 will provide an introduction to entrepreneurship by examining ideas, products, and opportunities. In unit 2, you will learn about the basics of market research, including how to identify an opportunity. The next unit in the course will focus on business plans, why these plans are important, and will give you a chance to practice composing a business plan. In the final unit of the course, we will present basics for funding a business and will help you create a persuasive presentation, or pitch, based on a business plan.
Entrepreneurship: Launching an Innovative Business Specialization
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Beginner Level
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Approx. 5 months to complete
Suggested 2 hour/week
Identify, Analyze, and Launch Your Startup. Build Your Skills to Develop Great Ideas into Great Companies.
Develop your entrepreneurial mindset and skill sets, learn how to bring innovations to market, and craft a business model to successfully launch your new business.
The Entrepreneurship Specialization examines the entrepreneurial mindset and skill sets, indicators of innovation opportunities, critical steps to bring innovations to the marketplace, and innovation strategies to establish and maintain a competitive advantage. Fundamentals of new venture financing are explored with attention to capital structures for new ventures, term sheets and how to negotiate them, and the differences between early-stage versus later-stage financing. You will develop an understanding of how to develop winning investor pitches, who and when to pitch, how to avoid common mistakes, and how to ‘get to the close’. In the final Capstone Project, you will apply the tools and concepts from the specialization courses by crafting a comprehensive, customer-validated business model, and creating a business plan and investor pitch.
Essentials of Entrepreneurship: Thinking & Action
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Beginner Level
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Approx. 7 months to complete
Suggested 2 hour/week
Manage Your Social Strategies. Expand your online audience and establish your social brand in five courses.
Success in business can be greatly enhanced with an understanding of key entrepreneurial characteristics and competencies solutions. This interactive course provides potential entrepreneurs with the knowledge of succeeding in an entrepreneurial opportunity. Topics include: how creativity, opportunity and feasibility are best evaluated; business strategies for new businesses; importance of a business plan; achieving success in a new business. At the end of the course students will have the skills and confidence to evaluate starting a business, in addition to becoming more enterprising in how they approach their roles should they decide to work in organizations.
Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Learn about the many faces of and contexts for entrepreneurship
- Learn about the entrepreneurial process and how to manage it
- Learn about what it takes to be an entrepreneur and your own potential to be one
- Learn to recognize opportunities to generate and assess your own business idea
- Explain the business planning process
- Apply entrepreneurial approaches, concepts and methods to your own business idea
- Learn about the operational issues in developing new business ventures
Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation
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Beginner Level
No prior experience required.
Approx. 23 hours to complete
This free 6 week course is for anyone who wants to make a difference. Whether you are already familiar with the field of social innovation or social entrepreneurship, working for an organization that wants to increase its social impact, or just starting out, this course will take you on a journey of exploring the complex problems that surround us and how to start thinking about solutions.
We will debunk common assumptions around what resources are needed to begin acting as a social innovator. We will learn from the numerous examples of social innovations happening all over the world. You will be challenged to get out of your comfort zone and start engaging with the diverse spaces around you. By the end of the course, you will have formed your own approach to social innovation, and you will have begun to develop the concepts, mindset, skills, and relationships that will enable you to start and evolve as a changemaker. You will be able to purchase a Verified Certificate if you wish to show evidence of your achievements, but this is optional, and you may apply for Financial Aid if you are unable to pay the certificate fee.
Brand Management: Aligning Business, Brand and Behaviour
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Beginner Level
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Approx. 21 hours to complete
Access all lectures, readings, and assignments for free.
Professor Nader Tavassoli of London Business School contrasts traditional approaches to branding – where brands are a visual identity and a promise to customers – to brands as a customer experience delivered by the entire organisation. The course offers a brand workout for your own brands, as well as guest videos from leading branding professionals.
The aim of the course is to change the conception of brands as being an organisation’s visual identity (e.g., logo) and image (customers’ brand associations) to an experience along “moments-that-matter” along the customer journey and, therefore, delivered by people across the entire organisation. Brands are thus not only an external promise to customers, but a means of executing business strategy via internal brand-led behaviour and culture change.
You will learn and practice the following skills:
- How to build brands from a broad organisational perspective
- How to lead brand-led culture change with human resource practices at the core (i.e., brand as a lever and not just an outcome)
- How to build brands in multi-brand companies, across cultures and geographies
- How to measure brand health in new ways, that is, internally in addition to externally
- How to value and capture returns to brands across the organisation – introducing the new concept of employee-based brand equity – and how this is different from the valuation of brands as intangible assets.
Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society
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Beginner Level
No prior experience required.
Approx. 22 hours to complete
Enroll for free
This is a course aimed at making you a better designer. The course marries theory and practice, as both are valuable in improving design performance. Lectures and readings will lay out the fundamental concepts that underpin design as a human activity. Weekly design challenges test your ability to apply those ideas to solve real problems. The course is deliberately broad – spanning all domains of design, including architecture, graphics, services, apparel, engineered goods, and products. The emphasis of the course is the basic design process: define, explore, select, and refine. You, the student, bring to the course your particular interests and expertise related to, for instance, engineering, furniture, fashion, architecture, or products. In prior sessions of the course about half of the participants were novices and about half had prior professional design expertise. Both groups seem to benefit substantially from the course. All project work is evaluated by your peers — and indeed, you will also be a peer reviewer. This format allows you to see an interesting collection of projects while getting useful feedback on your own project.
Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies: The First Step in Entrepreneurship
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Flexible Schedule
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Beginner Level
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Approx. 8 hours to complete
This course assists aspiring and active entrepreneurs in developing great ideas into great companies. With strong economies presenting rich opportunities for new venture creation, and challenging economic times presenting the necessity for many to make their own job, the need to develop the skills to develop and act on innovative business opportunities is increasingly vital.
Using proven content, methods, and models for new venture opportunity assessment and analysis, you will learn how to: * Identify and analyze entrepreneurial opportunities; * Enhance your entrepreneurial mindset; * Improve your strategic decision-making; and * Build innovative business models. Our goal is to demystify the startup process, and to help you build the skills to identify and act on innovative opportunities now, and in the future. With this course, students experience a sampling of the ideas and techniques explored in the University of Maryland’s master’s degree in technology entrepreneurship, an innovative, 100% online program.