Entrepreneurship as a field of study has gained importance pursuant to the emphasis on creating innovative start-ups and the global success of start-ups across sectors and industries. Large companies are keen to support start-ups to develop solutions in an independent and free environment, away from the corporate culture and bureaucracy, in an agile manner which large companies may find difficult to pursue. Venture capitalists are also eager to invest in innovative start-ups and nurture them to achieve scale. Start-ups are known to have a high failure rate as entrepreneurs who are often domain experts, may not have the skills to create, manage, grow and scale a venture. The Entrepreneurship specialisation is designed to train the student to become a successful entrepreneur.
The Entrepreneurship specialisation equips the student to think like an entrepreneur, an innovator and a business head. It enables the student develop a creative mindset, a problem-solving attitude and result orientation, which are treasured in organizations that require self-directed individuals, to head business units over time, take over reins of a family business and to set up their own entrepreneurial ventures.
The courses develop an entrepreneurial mindset in students which differentiates them from other employees in any organization. They cover a broad spectrum of topics and skills required to think creatively, ideate solutions for difficult problems, create innovative solutions, convert them into viable opportunities, make a detailed business plan, understand the issues in financing start-ups, and scale the venture profitably. The courses go beyond mere introduction of concepts and frameworks, to include inter-disciplinary applications through experiential learning, continuous improvement and innovation, strategic planning to scale up for global competitiveness and to create economic and social value for the entrepreneur and the stakeholders.
The entrepreneurship courses start in the first year with one gateway course to expose students to the Area and make an informed decision to pursue entrepreneurship as a Major or as a Minor. More courses are introduced in the second and third years. In the last semester of the third year, students are offered two career tracks viz., Creating New Age Industries and Family Managed Business, of which they can opt for any one of them. Each of the career tracks offers three courses to provide in-depth knowledge and specialize in the field.
SPECIALISATION AIMS
The Entrepreneurship Major and Minor intends to:
- Provide an integrated learning in multiple areas of knowledge through core courses in Business Management
- Develop an entrepreneurial mindset in students, to view problems as potential opportunities to create innovative solutions
- Provide students an understanding of the concepts, relevant theoretical frameworks and multiple approaches in the process of new venture creation
- Develop entrepreneurial competencies and motivation to students and help them develop the confidence to become an entrepreneur
- Help students develop their creative ability to generate business ideas and enable students to convert them into viable, scalable and sustainable business opportunities
- Equip students to think critically, objectively and innovatively to generate new business models
- Develop an effectual approach to entrepreneurship, to generate and implement solutions with available resources, expanding the horizon with the journey
- Equip students with application of numeracy to develop and effectively communicate a business plan to investors
- Educate students on the various debt and equity funding options for new ventures
- Educate students on the process and steps involved in setting up a new venture in India and familiarize them with the entrepreneurial eco-system
- Equip students to manage, take over and grow a family business
- Appreciate the importance of micro, small and medium enterprises and issues in managing them
- Understand the characteristics of doing business in rural markets and with people at the bottom-of-the-pyramid
MAJOR OUTCOMES: After successful completion of the Major, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate basic knowledge in accounting, economics, finance, management, Entrepreneurship, and marketing in application of concepts and theories.
- Integrate the concepts of the core areas of business and apply it in various contexts.
- Understand the importance of the ethics in business activities.
- Demonstrate an entrepreneurial mindset
- Apply the tools of creativity and innovation to generate alternate solutions to real problems
- Experiment with alternate solutions to evaluate them for market acceptance
- Outline the various resources required to convert the opportunity into a real venture
- Estimate the funding needs to set up and make the venture sustainable over time
- Assess the financial viability of a new venture and recognize the importance of cash flow management
- Develop a business plan to raise finance for a venture
- Relate to the methodology used by financiers to examine a funding request
- Recognize the phases in the life cycle of a venture and its related nuances of resource requirements and management focus
- Formulate a strategy to create demand, deliver the solution and scale the venture with a sustainable cash flow
- Describe the importance of micro, small and medium enterprises and issues in managing them as an entrepreneur
- Distinguish the requirements of doing business in the rural markets and with people at the bottom-of-the-pyramid with respect to the urban and international markets
MINOR OUTCOMES: After successful completion of the Minor, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate an entrepreneurial mindset
- Outline the various resources required to convert the opportunity into a real venture
- Estimate the funding needs to set up and make the venture sustainable over time
- Assess the financial viability of a new venture and recognize the importance of cash flow management
- Develop a business plan to raise finance for a venture
- Relate to the methodology used by financiers to examine a funding request
- Recognize the phases in the life cycle of a venture and its related nuances of resource requirements and management focus
- Formulate a strategy to create demand, deliver the solution and scale the venture with a sustainable cash flow
- Describe the importance of micro, small and medium enterprises and issues in managing them as an entrepreneur
- Distinguish the requirements of doing business in the rural markets and with people at the bottom-of-the-pyramid with respect to the urban and international markets
37 MAJOR COURSES
| Introduction to Operations Research | Financial Management | Launching and Scaling up New Ventures |
| Introduction to Finance and Accounting | Business Ideation and Lean Startup | Go To Market Strategy or Integrated Marketing Communication or Retail Management |
| Consumer & Markets | Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid | Professionalizing a Family Business |
| Introduction to People Management | Design Thinking for Managers | Consumer Demand Analytics with Big Data |
| Introduction to Entrepreneurship & Family Business | Enterprise Risk Management | Corporate Entrepreneurship |
| Introduction to Spreadsheet Modeling | Business Ethics and Corporate Governance | Special Topics in Entrepreneurship |
| Introduction to Quantitative Methods | Business Plan Development and Entrepreneurial Finance | Entrepreneurship in Practice |
| Managerial Economics | Entrepreneurial Failure and Sustenance | Gamification |
| Accounting for Managers | Managing a Family Business | CSR and Entrepreneurship |
| Marketing Management | Negotiations | Special Topics in Entrepreneurship |
| Organisational Behaviour | Special Topics in Entrepreneurship | Concept to commercialization |
| Research Methods for Managers | Business Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategy | Special Topics in Entrepreneurship |
| Graduation Project |
Introduction to Operations Research
The course exposes students to fundamental optimization procedures and techniques to attain skills at structuring business problems and modelling them as a mathematical program, Microsoft Excel to solve such models, interpret solutions and use the solutions to answer the business problem. The focus of this course will be on applications of quantitative methods in modelling business situations.
Introduction to Finance and Accounting
The course is aimed at baptising the students to the vocabularies of accounting theories and practices. Beginning with the accounting concepts, introducing the basic tenets in maintaining the books of accounts, the course finally culminates into the preparation of the financial statements like Income statement, Balance Sheet as well as the Cash flow statement. It also covers the Bank reconciliation statement and Bills of Exchange
Consumer & Markets
This course provides a conceptual framework to the students to understand the various dimensions of marketing as a discipline. It focuses on exploring various aspects of marketing, markets, consumers, their shopping behaviour and motivations. It gives broad understanding of the exciting world of Shop, Shopping and Shopper.
Introduction to People Management
The course familiarizes students with the history and functions of management. It gives an overview of the various functions of human resource management and the concepts of organizational behaviour. It prepares students to go deeper into the area of people management equipping them with the basic background knowledge.
Introduction to Entrepreneurship & Family Business
This course introduces students to entrepreneurship and family businesses. It provides an overview on how they come into being, their perspective on the ecosystem, their mindset and how they manage their enterprises.
Introduction to Spreadsheet Modeling
This course deals with the use of the Spreadsheet to solve managerial problems. It merely highlights the use of Microsoft Excel as an aid in formulating business problems and invoking appropriate functions to resolve them.
Introduction to Quantitative Methods
This course is designed to give undergraduate students an introduction to decision making. The use of quantitative techniques is increasingly being adopted in all areas of human endeavour. The need to collect, analyze and interpret mathematical output is increasingly being appreciated for arriving at conclusions or in strategic decision making. This course will deal with fundamental concepts required to model, analyse and solve quantitative problems arising in any discipline. A student undertaking this course can have little to no formal introduction to mathematics and statistics at the higher secondary level.
Managerial Economics
This course provides a foundation of economic theories and models for use in managerial decision-making. The course provides students with an overview of theories of demand, supply, production and competition and equips them with the tools and techniques to make effective economic decisions under different business environments.
Accounting for Managers
Financial accounting provides the means of recording and reporting financial information in a business. Accounting plays a vital role as an information system for monitoring, problem solving and decision-making. This course provides the fundamentals of Financial Accounting and goes on to demonstrate how accounting fits into the overall business environment of an organization. In addition to this, Management Accounting systems, which have a strong internal focus can be effective tools in providing information that is useful in decision making at all levels in the organization. Management accountants play a strategic role in developing and providing both financial and non-financial information that is critical to the success of an organization.
Marketing Management
This course provides a conceptual framework to the students to understand the function of marketing in an organization. The course helps students to apply the marketing concepts and theories to solve case studies and projects. The course makes them vigilant of the marketing happenings in the real world and therefore importance of creating effective marketing strategies.
Organisational Behaviour
This course is an introduction to organizational behaviour for undergraduates. It discusses behaviour in organizations at individual, group & organizational levels and provides an understanding of the underlying aspects that drive behavior. It provides insights into the different theories and their application in the organizational context. It also enables students to understand theutilisation of different tools and practices in directing individual actions towards organizational objectives.
Research Methods for Managers
The objective of the course is to enable students to understand the role and importance of research in improving managerial decisions when faced with uncertainty. Research methods are applied in all functional areas of business viz. operation management, accounting, finance and marketing. The issue facing managers is not a shortage of information but how to use the available information to make better decisions. Learning this course helps students recognise that data are inherently variable and that the identification measurement, control, and reduction of variation provide opportunities for quality improvement.
Financial Management
This course in Financial Management provides a detailed understanding of the Finance Function and its interrelationship with other areas of Business. It seeks to develop the foundation for financial management concepts. It primarily helps the student to understand how businesses make investment, Financing, working capital management and dividend decisions and what are the key factors that influence these decisions.
Business Ideation and Lean Startup
Getting a good business idea can be a challenging task. Even more challenging is to identify a creative or innovative one that can be converted into a business opportunity. The course is designed to expose the student to the process of ideation using techniques like design thinking and SCAMPER, the lean startup methodology, creating a value proposition, creating a business model canvas and evaluating the opportunity. These together lay the foundation of a good business opportunity.
Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid
The course is designed for students to appreciate the challenges and opportunities for businesses catering to people at the bottom of the pyramid. The students will examine the role of local and community enterprise models, role of financial intermediation including microfinance and impact investing, and models of local entrepreneurship to appreciate what measures can be introduced to improve long-term sustainability.
Design Thinking for Managers
Design Thinking (DT) is a powerful tool to tackle the unstructured & the unknown. DT is a ‘human centered’ approach to problem solving which emerged at Stanford in the 1960’s primarily as a systematic, immersive approach to product design. In recent years, it was found that these approaches can be extended to a wide category of ill-structured, real-world problems, both in emerging and developed markets alike. DT is getting increasingly popular not only across top corporates, but also in rural, semi-urban and underserved sections of society. Given the diversity of challenges that we face today, it therefore becomes necessary to have thinkers and doers who can focus on addressing such challenges. DT helps in building those capabilities.
Enterprise Risk Management
Risk management has traditionally been associated with financial institutions, banking, and insurance businesses. In today's business world, whether large or small, risk management is a crucial success factor. Enterprise risk management encompasses risk-based decision making in its essence. The increased likelihood of a startup's survival and the development of a resource-efficient growth model can be ascribed to risk-based decision making. This course's objectives are to increase participants' risk awareness and instill a culture of risk management. In this comprehensive course, students will gain an in-depth understanding of enterprise risk management (ERM).
Business Ethics and Corporate Governance
The course aims to develop in the student a clear perspective on the role and responsibilities of business in society. It helps the student understand the role of ethics in business. It also dwells on corporate governance frameworks and their relevance to contemporary business environment.
Business Plan Development and Entrepreneurial Finance
Entrepreneurs require various forms of funding during the initial stages of a new venture. They often find it difficult to raise funds to their satisfaction. The course will introduce the student to the various sources of finance an entrepreneur can explore.
Financiers on the other hand, have funds waiting for deployment. They constantly seek good ventures for funding. It is said that an idea can sell itself. However, entrepreneurs need to present their idea in a manner that appeals to financiers. A business plan is a comprehensive document which captures the entire business along with plans for the future. It projects the future course of action represented by opportunities and maps the financial, operational, marketing and organizational strategies that will enable the organization to achieve its goals.
The course is designed to provide the student with a conceptual understanding of the business plan document and to make one in a team of 2-3 students. The process will simulate the development of a business plan for a new venture, enabling the students to experience entrepreneurial thinking. This exercise will start from the second session and will run through the semester. It will have intermediate evaluations, a final submission and presentations.
Entrepreneurial Failure and Sustenance
This course discusses why startups fail, what entrepreneurs can do to reduce the probability of failure, what they should do to survive and sustain for the long haul. While most failures occur during the initial stages of a venture, many survive the journey and a few encounters late-stage failure. The student will learn how investors and financiers identify potential failures, understand some corrective measures which are available and how ventures could be bailed out. The course provides insights into the pitfalls and obstacles entrepreneurs encounter in their journey and discusses what could be done to overcome them.
Managing a Family Business
Most family managed businesses in India belong to the Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector. The significance of the MSME sector to the Indian economy in terms to its high involvement to manufacturing output, the national income, as also employment cannot be overlooked. The management style of families presents challenges to the growth, expansion, succession planning and sustainability of the family businesses. Many family businesses have made it big while others stagnate beyond a point. This course provides an overview of the nuances associated with managing a family business.
Negotiations
Negotiation is a commonly used and vital tool to make decisions in the organizational context. Based on the position and role of an employee, he or she has to engage in some kind of negotiation at one point of time or the other. Negotiation is driven by assumptions, perceptions and understanding about human behavior. This course would be designed to familiarize future professionals and managers about when to engage in negotiation, how to understand the negotiation partner, what negotiation technique to use at what point in time and how to develop negotiation skills.
Business Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategy
In a rapidly changing business environment, Innovation has been recognised as one of the key drivers of competitive advantage. This course is an introduction to the concept of innovation for corporate managers and entrepreneurs.
Launching and Scaling up New Ventures
This course will employ the Marketplace Live simulation as a learning environment. The students start and run their own company, struggling with business fundamentals and the interplay between marketing, human resources, operations, finance, and accounting. They are given control of a simulated business and must manage its operations through several decision cycles under competition from their peers.
Go To Market Strategy
This course is designed for students to examine the process and components of a marketing strategy for startups and for introducing innovative products/services in the market. Students will learn to extend their understanding of marketing to diagnose, analyze, apply and solve entrepreneurial marketing problems. They will understand the need to balance marketing strategy with effective traditional, conventional and digital marketing tools to create a cost effective, yet impactful campaign to attract and retain customers for a startup or an innovative product/service. They will then understand how to tweak the marketing strategy as the venture continues its journey and moves ahead in its life cycle.
Integrated Marketing Communication
Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) is a concept of integrating activities of marketing, selling, advertising, sales promotion, and other forms of Communication activities at the marketplace, to build and maintain brand value and brand equity for products and services. The Course is expected to offer an overall perspective of Marketing Communications and Promotion -- theory and practice - with activities including advertising, public relations, sales promotion, events, personal selling, direct marketing, and on-line promotion for overall effectiveness and success of the brand and the marketing company.
Retail Management
Retailing is a foundational business of any economy. It is the engine through which goods and services are transacted at the marketplace. Retailing is emerging as a significant sector of Indian economy and is expected to continue its growth trajectory. As such, understanding of Retail and the various elements of a retail business is of great importance to a business student. The course thus focuses on the retail industry: both physical and online
and it’s impact on the whole value chain. It is a highly experiential course which will be delivered through lectures, various field-based assignments, case studies, simulations and presentations.
Professionalizing a Family Business
This course is designed for students to examine the process and components of a marketing strategy for startups and for introducing innovative products/services in the market. Students will learn to extend their understanding of marketing to diagnose, analyze, apply and solve entrepreneurial marketing problems. They will understand the need to balance marketing strategy with effective traditional, conventional and digital marketing tools to create a cost effective, yet impactful campaign to attract and retain customers for a startup or an innovative product/service. They will then understand how to tweak the marketing strategy as the venture continues its journey and moves ahead in its life cycle.
Consumer Demand Analytics with Big Data
Demand forecasting is the process of using predictive analysis of historical data to estimate and predict customers’ future demand for a product or service. Demand forecasting helps the business make better-informed supply decisions that estimate the total sales and revenue for a future period of time.
Through demand forecasting, businesses can optimize inventory by predicting future sales from analyzing historical sales data to make informed business decisions about everything from inventory planning and warehousing needs to running flash sales and meeting customer expectations. The course focusses on Use of data analytics to predict demand with trend (as in new product introduction), seasonality, price elasticity and other environmental factors. Demand analytics will also help Identify the key drivers for demand and quantify their impact.
It will help build, validate and improve forecasting models with both continuous and categorical variables.
Corporate Entrepreneurship
This course introduces students to corporate entrepreneurship and its dimensions and discusses the benefits and challenges corporates face while creating an entrepreneurial culture in their organization. Organizations need to tap the talent of the younger generation, their mind-set, energy and drive to create innovative tech-enabled solutions to everyday situations. Indian organizations have recognized the importance of corporate entrepreneurship and are encouraging it within the organization and also supporting startups as an extended entrepreneurial arm.
Entrepreneurship in Practice
Entrepreneurship is an ever-evolving area. Creativity and innovation are its hallmarks. It is important to understand how enterprises create and implement innovative business models to address the problems and needs of society. This course will provide an insight into the mind of the entrepreneur, how problems were identified, synthesized and addressed, how solutions were created and implemented and how customer acceptance was accomplished. The course is case study based with a final assignment to design a solution to address a real problem. The course will equip the students with practical skills that helps an entrepreneur put the learnings to practice immediately in the real-world.
Gamification
Learn how fashion and luxury companies work and understand their brands, products, retail, and communication strategies. Travel through business models, international development, and product categories with industry influent experts.
Adopting a case-study approach, the course presents strategic brand management in luxury and fashion companies as a balancing act: tradition vs. innovation, expertise vs. experimentation, casual vs. stylish; in order to increase the brand value by nurturing the brand heritage and at the same time staying fresh, relevant, and contemporary in the global marketplace.
Topics such as the impact of new retail channels, new media channels, and new business declinations for the brand and emerging markets will be discussed in the course
CSR and Entrepreneurship
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) came into being with a regulation and has since played an important role to provide funding and support to social initiatives and ventures. This course discusses the role of CSR, the activities supported by various organizations and how entrepreneurial ventures have emerged to address social issues with CSR funding. The course adopts the case study-based approach where students are required to analyze the CSR activities of 2-3 organizations and study 1-2 social ventures which utilize CSR funds to create social products and solutions. The course will equip the students with practical skills that helps an entrepreneur put the learnings to practice immediately in the real-world.
Concept to commercialization
This course will cover the process of discovering, experimenting, defining and developing new products. In order to grow, all companies need to think of new features or products to improve or expand their offerings and market share. In case of new companies, these new products form the basis for their existence. The course would highlight the steps one needs to go through in a systematic manner from the product idea stage, with an emphasis on actual development and creation of new products to commercializing the product. The course will teach students hands-on skills that will allow them to use their knowledge in the real world immediately in an entrepreneurial setting.
29 MINOR COURSES
| Introduction to Operations Research | Business Ideation and Lean Startup | Consumer Demand Analytics with Big Data |
| Introduction to Finance and Accounting | Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid | Corporate Entrepreneurship |
| Consumer & Markets | Enterprise Risk Management | Special Topics in Entrepreneurship |
| Introduction to People Management | Business Plan Development and Entrepreneurial Finance | Entrepreneurship in Practice |
| Introduction to Entrepreneurship & Family Business | Entrepreneurial Failure and Sustenance | Gamification |
| Introduction to Spreadsheet Modeling | Managing a Family Business | CSR and Entrepreneurship |
| Introduction to Quantitative Methods | Special Topics in Entrepreneurship | Special Topics in Entrepreneurship |
| Managerial Economics | Launching and Scaling up New Ventures | Concept to commercialization |
| Accounting for Managers | Go To Market Strategy or Integrated Marketing Communication or Retail Management | Special Topics in Entrepreneurship |
| Financial Management | Professionalizing a Family Business |
Introduction to Operations Research
The course exposes students to fundamental optimization procedures and techniques to attain skills at structuring business problems and modelling them as a mathematical program, Microsoft Excel to solve such models, interpret solutions and use the solutions to answer the business problem. The focus of this course will be on applications of quantitative methods in modelling business situations.
Introduction to Finance and Accounting
The course is aimed at baptising the students to the vocabularies of accounting theories and practices. Beginning with the accounting concepts, introducing the basic tenets in maintaining the books of accounts, the course finally culminates into the preparation of the financial statements like Income statement, Balance Sheet as well as the Cash flow statement. It also covers the Bank reconciliation statement and Bills of Exchange
Consumer & Markets
This course provides a conceptual framework to the students to understand the various dimensions of marketing as a discipline. It focuses on exploring various aspects of marketing, markets, consumers, their shopping behaviour and motivations. It gives broad understanding of the exciting world of Shop, Shopping and Shopper.
Introduction to People Management
The course familiarizes students with the history and functions of management. It gives an overview of the various functions of human resource management and the concepts of organizational behaviour. It prepares students to go deeper into the area of people management equipping them with the basic background knowledge.
Introduction to Entrepreneurship & Family Business
This course introduces students to entrepreneurship and family businesses. It provides an overview on how they come into being, their perspective on the ecosystem, their mindset and how they manage their enterprises.
Introduction to Spreadsheet Modeling
This course deals with the use of the Spreadsheet to solve managerial problems. It merely highlights the use of Microsoft Excel as an aid in formulating business problems and invoking appropriate functions to resolve them.
Introduction to Quantitative Methods
This course is designed to give undergraduate students an introduction to decison making. The use of quantitative techniques is increasingly being adopted in all areas of human endeavour. The need to collect, analyze and interpret mathematical output is increasingly being appreciated for arriving at conclusions or in strategic decision making. This course will deal with fundamental concepts required to model, analyse and solve quantitative problems arising in any discipline. A student undertaking this course can have little to no formal introduction to mathematics and statistics at the higher secondary level.
Managerial Economics
This course provides a foundation of economic theories and models for use in managerial decision-making. The course provides students with an overview of theories of demand, supply, production and competition and equips them with the tools and techniques to make effective economic decisions under different business environments.
Accounting for Managers
Financial accounting provides the means of recording and reporting financial information in a business. Accounting plays a vital role as an information system for monitoring, problem solving and decision-making. This course provides the fundamentals of Financial Accounting and goes on to demonstrate how accounting fits into the overall business environment of an organization. In addition to this, Management Accounting systems, which have a strong internal focus can be effective tools in providing information that is useful in decision making at all levels in the organization. Management accountants play a strategic role in developing and providing both financial and non-financial information that is critical to the success of an organization.
Financial Management
This course in Financial Management provides a detailed understanding of the Finance Function and its interrelationship with other areas of Business. It seeks to develop the foundation for financial management concepts. It primarily helps the student to understand how businesses make investment, Financing, working capital management and dividend decisions and what are the key factors that influence these decisions.
Business Ideation and Lean Startup
Getting a good business idea can be a challenging task. Even more challenging is to identify a creative or innovative one that can be converted into a business opportunity. The course is designed to expose the student to the process of ideation using techniques like design thinking and SCAMPER, the lean startup methodology, creating a value proposition, creating a business model canvas and evaluating the opportunity. These together lay the foundation of a good business opportunity.
Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid
The course is designed for students to appreciate the challenges and opportunities for businesses catering to people at the bottom of the pyramid. The students will examine the role of local and community enterprise models, role of financial intermediation including microfinance and impact investing, and models of local entrepreneurship to appreciate what measures can be introduced to improve long-term sustainability.
Enterprise Risk Management
Risk management has traditionally been associated with financial institutions, banking, and insurance businesses. In today's business world, whether large or small, risk management is a crucial success factor. Enterprise risk management encompasses risk-based decision making in its essence. The increased likelihood of a startup's survival and the development of a resource-efficient growth model can be ascribed to risk-based decision making. This course's objectives are to increase participants' risk awareness and instill a culture of risk management. In this comprehensive course, students will gain an in-depth understanding of enterprise risk management (ERM).
Business Plan Development and Entrepreneurial Finance
Entrepreneurs require various forms of funding during the initial stages of a new venture. They often find it difficult to raise funds to their satisfaction. The course will introduce the student to the various sources of finance an entrepreneur can explore.
Financiers on the other hand, have funds waiting for deployment. They constantly seek good ventures for funding. It is said that an idea can sell itself. However, entrepreneurs need to present their idea in a manner that appeals to financiers. A business plan is a comprehensive document which captures the entire business along with plans for the future. It projects the future course of action represented by opportunities and maps the financial, operational, marketing and organizational strategies that will enable the organization to achieve its goals.
The course is designed to provide the student with a conceptual understanding of the business plan document and to make one in a team of 2-3 students. The process will simulate the development of a business plan for a new venture, enabling the students to experience entrepreneurial thinking. This exercise will start from the second session and will run through the semester. It will have intermediate evaluations, a final submission and presentations.
Entrepreneurial Failure and Sustenance
This course discusses why startups fail, what entrepreneurs can do to reduce the probability of failure, what they should do to survive and sustain for the long haul. While most failures occur during the initial stages of a venture, many survive the journey and a few encounters late-stage failure. The student will learn how investors and financiers identify potential failures, understand some corrective measures which are available and how ventures could be bailed out. The course provides insights into the pitfalls and obstacles entrepreneurs encounter in their journey and discusses what could be done to overcome them.
Managing a Family Business
Most family managed businesses in India belong to the Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector. The significance of the MSME sector to the Indian economy in terms to its high involvement to manufacturing output, the national income, as also employment cannot be overlooked. The management style of families presents challenges to the growth, expansion, succession planning and sustainability of the family businesses. Many family businesses have made it big while others stagnate beyond a point. This course provides an overview of the nuances associated with managing a family business.
Launching and Scaling up New Ventures
This course will employ the Marketplace Live simulation as a learning environment. The students start and run their own company, struggling with business fundamentals and the interplay between marketing, human resources, operations, finance, and accounting. They are given control of a simulated business and must manage its operations through several decision cycles under competition from their peers.
Go To Market Strategy
This course is designed for students to examine the process and components of a marketing strategy for startups and for introducing innovative products/services in the market. Students will learn to extend their understanding of marketing to diagnose, analyze, apply and solve entrepreneurial marketing problems. They will understand the need to balance marketing strategy with effective traditional, conventional and digital marketing tools to create a cost effective, yet impactful campaign to attract and retain customers for a startup or an innovative product/service. They will then understand how to tweak the marketing strategy as the venture continues its journey and moves ahead in its life cycle.
Integrated Marketing Communication
Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) is a concept of integrating activities of marketing, selling, advertising, sales promotion, and other forms of Communication activities at the marketplace, to build and maintain brand value and brand equity for products and services. The Course is expected to offer an overall perspective of Marketing Communications and Promotion -- theory and practice - with activities including advertising, public relations, sales promotion, events, personal selling, direct marketing, and on-line promotion for overall effectiveness and success of the brand and the marketing company.
Retail Management
Retailing is a foundational business of any economy. It is the engine through which goods and services are transacted at the marketplace. Retailing is emerging as a significant sector of Indian economy and is expected to continue its growth trajectory. As such, understanding of Retail and the various elements of a retail business is of great importance to a business student. The course thus focuses on the retail industry: both physical and online
and it’s impact on the whole value chain. It is a highly experiential course which will be delivered through lectures, various field-based assignments, case studies, simulations and presentations.
Professionalizing a Family Business
This course is designed for students to examine the process and components of a marketing strategy for startups and for introducing innovative products/services in the market. Students will learn to extend their understanding of marketing to diagnose, analyze, apply and solve entrepreneurial marketing problems. They will understand the need to balance marketing strategy with effective traditional, conventional and digital marketing tools to create a cost effective, yet impactful campaign to attract and retain customers for a startup or an innovative product/service. They will then understand how to tweak the marketing strategy as the venture continues its journey and moves ahead in its life cycle.
Consumer Demand Analytics with Big Data
Demand forecasting is the process of using predictive analysis of historical data to estimate and predict customers’ future demand for a product or service. Demand forecasting helps the business make better-informed supply decisions that estimate the total sales and revenue for a future period of time.
Through demand forecasting, businesses can optimize inventory by predicting future sales from analyzing historical sales data to make informed business decisions about everything from inventory planning and warehousing needs to running flash sales and meeting customer expectations. The course focusses on Use of data analytics to predict demand with trend (as in new product introduction), seasonality, price elasticity and other environmental factors. Demand analytics will also help Identify the key drivers for demand and quantify their impact.
It will help build, validate and improve forecasting models with both continuous and categorical variables.
Corporate Entrepreneurship
This course introduces students to corporate entrepreneurship and its dimensions and discusses the benefits and challenges corporates face while creating an entrepreneurial culture in their organization. Organizations need to tap the talent of the younger generation, their mind-set, energy and drive to create innovative tech-enabled solutions to everyday situations. Indian organizations have recognized the importance of corporate entrepreneurship and are encouraging it within the organization and also supporting startups as an extended entrepreneurial arm.
Entrepreneurship in Practice
Entrepreneurship is an ever-evolving area. Creativity and innovation are its hallmarks. It is important to understand how enterprises create and implement innovative business models to address the problems and needs of society. This course will provide an insight into the mind of the entrepreneur, how problems were identified, synthesized and addressed, how solutions were created and implemented and how customer acceptance was accomplished. The course is case study based with a final assignment to design a solution to address a real problem. The course will equip the students with practical skills that helps an entrepreneur put the learnings to practice immediately in the real-world.
Gamification
Learn how fashion and luxury companies work and understand their brands, products, retail, and communication strategies. Travel through business models, international development, and product categories with industry influent experts.
Adopting a case-study approach, the course presents strategic brand management in luxury and fashion companies as a balancing act: tradition vs. innovation, expertise vs. experimentation, casual vs. stylish; in order to increase the brand value by nurturing the brand heritage and at the same time staying fresh, relevant, and contemporary in the global marketplace.
Topics such as the impact of new retail channels, new media channels, and new business declinations for the brand and emerging markets will be discussed in the course
CSR and Entrepreneurship
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) came into being with a regulation and has since played an important role to provide funding and support to social initiatives and ventures. This course discusses the role of CSR, the activities supported by various organizations and how entrepreneurial ventures have emerged to address social issues with CSR funding. The course adopts the case study-based approach where students are required to analyze the CSR activities of 2-3 organizations and study 1-2 social ventures which utilize CSR funds to create social products and solutions. The course will equip the students with practical skills that helps an entrepreneur put the learnings to practice immediately in the real-world.
Concept to commercialization
This course will cover the process of discovering, experimenting, defining and developing new products. In order to grow, all companies need to think of new features or products to improve or expand their offerings and market share. In case of new companies, these new products form the basis for their existence. The course would highlight the steps one needs to go through in a systematic manner from the product idea stage, with an emphasis on actual development and creation of new products to commercializing the product. The course will teach students hands-on skills that will allow them to use their knowledge in the real world immediately in an entrepreneurial setting.