This is the course web site for the Fall 2014 Edition of "IT Entrepreneurship".
In this course you will learn how to approach a business idea or concept and from many different perspectives to better define the idea, test it with customers and other stakeholders, and figure out the key risks and costs, and finally make a go-no go decision. (This course was called COSI 235a last year. We’ve renumbered it to make it available to under graduates as well as graduate students.)
We want to take an idea – let’s say a ‘good idea’ (see Ideas are cheap!) – to fruition as a business that has a chance to make real money and/or have an big imact on a many real people’s lives. Not a hobby that you pursue because you’d like to learn and grow – which is fine – but something that you have real reason to believe will make a big difference. It is said that 9 out of 10 startups fail. Our goal is to improve your odds.
This is not a software engineering course!It is a course that helps you develop the discipline and tools to develop your idea and to assure that it will meet its goals - like making money and/or having an actual real impact on the world.
I use the line “is this a hobby or a business.” For this course I am not interested in doing a project because it’s fun or you get to learn how to use rails or javascript. Those are great personal goals which are fine but will not effect a change in the world.
Open to undergrads and graduate students: with permission of instructor (that would be Pito Salas) To get permission, fill out this form: Cosi 165a Permission