From Entrepreneurial Thinking to Market Relevance - How Startups Scale

Abstract

This elective is relevant if you’re planning to join or start a startup in the near future. It will help you recognise how value is created and captured. This includes go-to market, marketing & visibility across verticals & across the supply chain for sustained value capture & business model sustainability.In short, it’s the journey of how to create a billion dollar startup.

Objective

At the conclusion of the course, the students are able to: 1. The difference between technology and market relevance 2. Recognise challenges that startups face when they move from technology to commercialisation 3. Addressing the failures of startups in scaling, and how early decisions limit scaling and value capture 4. How recognising market need can help startups to create value and strengthen valuation with investors

Content

Technology startups face challenges in identifying market relevance in the course of commercialisation. Additionally, once they have matched their offering with market needs, they face additional challenges when scaling up since they get locked in early. Due to this, technology startups plateau off as niche. Platform startups, on the other hand, struggle with retaining relevance. Due to these aspects, failure rates are very high. This course addresses students who want to become entrepreneurs or want to join startups. They may come from business or science & technology backgrounds. The course will enable the students to identify the relevance of seeing the technology from an early stage startup from the market relevance perspective and use this to help the company drive revenue and relevance. The students will also get an overview of how platform startups can retain relevance. The students will have exposure to investors and entrepreneurs (with a focus on ETH spin-offs) through the course, to gain insight to commercialisation and subsequent scaling up of the technology. Topics cover idea validation, technology and market size validation and assessment of market relevance, assessing time-to-market, customer focus, perceived value for customers, and finally, opportunities of maximising relevance of technology idea into sustained market traction. There is a particular emphasis on market validation on each step of the journey, to ensure relevance. The course comprises lectures and talks from invited investors / entrepreneurs regarding the aforementioned elements. Additionally, students will form teams and will support an existing startup over the course of the semester. This will allow them to gain first-hand experience and insights into the dynamics of a early stage company. By having such real-life exposure, the course content will be transferred from theory to practice. Grading of the course will be based on in-class presentations as well as the student teams' performance and support of their selected startups.

Resources