Course List: Winter

Accounting for Entrepreneurship: From Start-up Through IPO

This course provides the core set of tools needed to effectively provide the accounting functions for private, entrepreneurial companies. The course follows the life-cycle of a company that begins life as a start-up, and the course covers the accounting-related financial metrics that are needed by an entrepreneur.

Cryptocurrency and Blockchain: Markets, Models, and Opportunities

Fundamentals of cryptocurrency as a type of money or asset, and the technology upon which it is based, present new business models, markets and opportunities.

Weekly topics include:

• WEEK 1: Introduction
• WEEK 2: Competition, Governance and Technology
• WEEK 3: Trading, Exchanges and Markets
• WEEK 4: ICO’s, STO’s and Regulation
• WEEK 5: Crypto-enabled Business Models

Lab to Launch

Lab based innovations have contributed the most important advances to humanity, from energy that power our lives to medicine that cures disease. Billions of dollars are spent each year developing lab based innovations, with new discoveries happening every day. However, limited effort is place on commercializing these discoveries, which could create global scale impact and vast wealth creation. A major reason for this is that the toolset required to be successful in this arena is much different than web/digital companies, which is currently the focus of most people or traditional corporate management.

Building the New Venture

Through class lectures, “game” assignments and real-world cases, you will learn how to raise initial seed funding, compensate for limited human and financial resources, establish initial brand values and positioning, leverage a strong niche position, determine appropriate sourcing and sales channels, and develop execution plans in sales, marketing, product development, and operations.

Developing New Products and Services

The primary purpose of this course is to provide marketers with an in-depth understanding of current best practices in new product development. Topics covered include: stage-gate new product processes, new product strategy, platform strategy, opportunity identification, perceptual mapping, market research techniques for uncovering customer needs, idea generation and screening, writing new product concept statements, concept optimization, new product forecasting methods (including innovation diffusion models and simulated test markets), brand extendability, and new product launch plans.

Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity

This course will use the case method to study entrepreneurial finance and, more broadly, private equity finance. The course is motivated by increases in both the supply of and demand for private equity.

Entrepreneurial Selling

In the Entrepreneurial Selling course, you will learn how to acquire customers, use selling skills in different contexts, tell powerful stories, manage entrepreneurial sales processes, and us the key tools required for success in selling.

New Product and Strategy Development Lab

This course complements Chicago Booth’s strong training in business theory by providing a problem-solving experience for a small but diverse group of students. The course accelerates the process by which students learn to manage themselves and others when developing solutions to real-world business problems.

New Venture and Small Enterprise Lab

You’ll work closely with senior management at early-stage companies on strategic and operational projects. You’ll be directly involved in helping them take their ideas to market. Students have worked on competitive analysis, marketing plans, market research, strategy development, consumer studies, pricing models, and marketing messaging for companies. The companies and enterprises that participate in the course represent diverse industries, including technology and biotech, as well as industrial- and consumer-based firms.

New Venture Strategy

Improving your ability to assess the attractiveness of a new venture, anticipate the problems likely to be encountered as the business evolves, and predict its success or failure is the focus of this class. You will learn a set of qualitative models into which all entrepreneurial companies can be categorized.

Taxes and Business Strategy

This course provides students with a framework for thinking about tax planning. This framework has two principal advantages. First, it is designed to have value long after the next tax act. Second, the framework is portable, in that it can be applied to any set of tax laws – those of the United States or any other country. Although the course generally focuses on U.S. based transactions and planning examples, the underlying ideas are applicable in other jurisdictions. Once developed, the framework is applied to a variety of business settings. The applications integrate concepts from finance, economics, and accounting to achieve a more complete understanding of the role of taxes in business strategy. The course also includes periodic focus on the financial accounting ramifications of tax planning. Moreover, the course content has valuation related implications.

Building Internet Startups: Risk, Reward and Failure

This course provides an overall understanding of entrepreneurship in the technology space and focuses on several concepts that are critical to expedite the pathway to identify viable business opportunities, grow an enterprise, and find a niche worthy of new business creation. The value of the course will be to present students with essential elements of disruptive innovation and entrepreneurship, specifically in the technology space, that they likely have not dwelled on in other forums.

Buyouts

In this course we will examine conflicts of interest in mergers and acquisitions, and especially in going private transactions in which publicly held companies are acquired by affiliates of private equity firms with the participation of the company’s management or by controlling shareholders. Both types of transactions raise conflict of interest issues because some of the company’s directors or officers, who are charged with protecting the public shareholders, may be accused of having interests adverse to those of the public shareholders.

Commercializing Innovation: Tools to Research and Analyze Private Enterprises

This course will focus on the strategy and tactics of forming, acquiring, and growing new ventures i.e., increasing shareholder value for business ventures funded with private equity. It is designed to aid those who are considering being part of an entrepreneurial project or evaluating such enterprises from the position of a public investor, private investor, or any stakeholder serving these emerging companies. The course will consider ventures representing broad sectors of the economy, including retail (both traditional and online), health care, telecommunications, consumer services, and businesses enhanced by the internet.

Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition

Taught by Mark Agnew and Brian O’Connor, Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (“ETA”) will give students frameworks and real world solutions to use if they decide to pursue an acquisition of and lead a company. The class will walk through the life cycle of a typical path toward finding and running a business including information on fund formation, raising capital, searching for a company, buying a business, leading that business and then ultimately selling it. Approximately half of the course will go through critical points leading up to buying a business, while the other half will address some of the key issues executives face while running a company (identifying metrics, communicating with a team, interviewing, handling HR issues, etc). Although the main focus will be on buying and running a business, the class is designed to be applicable to many other career paths including private equity, venture capital and entrepreneurship.

Introduction to Venture Capital: A Toolkit for Analyzing and Financing Startups

The Introduction to Venture Capital class is a combination of Professor Meadow’s Commercializing Innovation and Entrepreneurial Finance + Private Equity classes taught at Chicago Booth. This class will serve as a comprehensive introduction to the world of venture capital and equip you with the tools to analyze a private enterprise (startup). The first half of the course will focus on “building intellectual proof of concept” – a research- and data-driven approach to communicating the strategy and underlying economics of a new venture in an effective manner. The second half of the course will focus on the venture capitalist’s perspective on financing new enterprises and provide you with an understanding of valuation, security design, term sheet design, and the legal documentation and negotiation process that occurs around a startup financing event and exit. You’ll learn the methods of analysis to make the proper judgment from the investor’s point-of-view. The course will require that you develop primary and secondary research skills, a data-driven approach to creating referenceable projections, presentation skills, negotiation skills, and the ability to do meaningful analysis (i.e. to think creatively and logically).

Social Enterprise Lab

You will explore social entrepreneurship first-hand by working with local nonprofit enterprises and for-profit ventures that have a social mission. Students make strategic recommendations to the participating organizations and firms after careful analysis in order to leverage greater growth.

Technology Strategy

This course focuses on strategic decision making in technology intensive industries. We will develop a set of tools which are crucial for the formulation and management of a winning technology strategy. The course focuses on the application of conceptual models that clarify the interactions between external competition, firm positioning, patterns of technological and market change, and the nature and development of internal firm capabilities. There is particular emphasis on building models for making strategic decisions in the context of significant technology, demand, and competitive uncertainty.