Entrepreneurship at WHU

Course Objectives & set-up:

• Familiarize students with entrepreneurial finance and business models
• Students will solve two interactive entrepreneurial case studies in the two areas and one in-class case in Berlin.
• Students will connect with startups, consultancies, investors, and a law firm in Berlin to build up a network of future partners
• This course will help all students that consider starting their own company to build and run more successful firms  

This course provides students with current show cases how leading e-commerce startups and companies advance their operational performance through digitalization.

In today’s business world, technology increasingly plays a major role in determining a company’s future competitiveness. 

In this course, we focus on six main topics that are critical for the success of omni-channel players: 

1. Employee engagement and leadership
2. Managing the forward chain
3. Demand forecasting
4. Demand generation
5. Managing the backward chain
6. Customer online interaction to curtail mindless shopping

Cases and readings, mostly working papers under review or recently published articles in top managerial or academic journals, provide novel insights into the e-commerce operations of leading European retail, manufacturing or service companies.

Students will be able to discuss these approaches with numerous guest speakers from industry and academia.

Every entrepreneur is selling all the time: to customers, employees, and investors. Selling is a skill that can be learnt. Only few people are born as a selling ace. Some investors only invest if the founders themselves are the first sales people. The course content was designed based on interviews with WHU entrepreneurs and WHU investors:

• fit between go-to-market model and the business model (understanding sales cycles, decision processes)
• targeting consumers vs. small business vs. big enterprise
• defining and communicating the value proposition for your target audience
• face-to-face selling techniques: need identification, maneuvering the sales process
• hiring your first sales people (selecting the right sales professionals, designing their compensation)
• the typical GTM model: inbound marketing + tele sales / inside sales
• international market entry.

This module covers the specific agenda of using intellectual capital for competitive advantage in multiple market contexts. In the contemporary economic environment, intellectual assets like know-how, inventions, content, brands, trademarks (forms of intellectual property), contractual agreements etc. are the largest proportion of a firm’s total wealth. And yet, most firms do not proactively manage these assets. 

This module adopts a “lifecycle” approach to the management of an intellectual asset. Methods and frameworks developed in lecture are exercised in case studies from multiple settings including consumer electronics (Dolby, Creative Technologies, Apple), pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, Bayer), agriculture (Pinklady Apples), Entertainment (CAH & Disney) etc.

In this course we apply the Google-Sprint Format to class and to a blocked week of company visits in Berlin. We build teams and business models within the run of the course.

Following a five day sprint logic, we

1. analyze problems and challenges (day 1)
2. get an overview of the industry and competitors and start developing the value proposition as well as the customer segment (day 2)
3. build the business model and the prototype (day 3)
4. collect customer feedback (day 4)
5. report and pitch about all components (day 5)

The result is a real business idea and model that has undergone its first test via customer feedback using a real physical or electronic prototype.

In detail, the course will cover the following main aspects: innovation and competitive advantage, linking business and innovation strategy, defining and implementing innovation strategies, innovation portfolio management, R&D investment decisions, assessing and measuring R&D productivity, open innovation strategies, strategic alliances, M&A, external technology commercialization strategies, globalizing innovation, management of international R&D locations, management of globally dispersed innovation teams and the management of basic research.

Family businesses are one of the most dominant forms of organization around the world (with roughly 70-90% of all firms being family-influenced). The aim of this course is to study how family firms differ from non-family firms. The focus will thereby be on issues related to leading or managing a family firm. The course will focus on how to successfully lead family businesses in the 21st century. In particular, the course will cover the following topics: 

• Introduction and brief overview of family businesses (definition, meaning, and characteristics of family businesses; differences between family businesses and non-family businesses, especially in relation to goals, long-term orientation, structure, and resources; theories to explain family firm behavior in general)
• Leadership in family firms (Leadership styles; family vs. non-family CEOs; employee motivation)
• Transgenerational entrepreneurship in family firms (innovation behavior of family firms; adaptation to disruptive changes; entrepreneurship across generations)
• Strategic management and governance (“organization” of the family; strategic orientation and risk)

Within this course, students will conduct a group project with a family business. Each group will choose one specific family firm (either from their own network or with the support of the chair) and analyze this company with regard to family firm strength and weaknesses, growth potential, leadership, transgenerational entrepreneurship, succession, and strategic management/governance. Individual coaching sessions with the professor will help students to achieve their learning goals. The course will conclude with the students' presentation of their project results.

Venture capital is an important financial intermediary for, and component of entrepreneurship, innovation and organizational change. By one estimate, over 1,200 VC firms around the world are evaluating more than 20,000 business plans on a given day. The media extensively glorifies venture capitalists, policy-makers increasingly look to venture capital as a source of jobs and economic growth and hardly a day goes without another celebrity in the entertainment industry making a foray into the world of venture capital.

Nonetheless, little is understood about the structure, governance, strategy, incentives, culture, capabilities and operational processes of venture capital organizations. These gaps in understanding yield significant missteps and frustration for those intersecting with venture capital and in fact so much that especially many entrepreneurs feel venture capital is the “dark side” and inherently evil.

By offering a window into the inside dynamics and the intricacies of venture capital, this course aims to bridge these gaps for students and prepare them as a potential entrepreneur, venture capitalist, institutional investor, management consultant or a policy-maker.

In this course we develop your skills for visual thinking and visual prototyping.

The course is partitioned into three major parts:

1. Knowledge and application of basic visualization skills.
   You will learn all the basic skills and tools it takes to generate simple visualizations, both physical as well as electronically (using the program “Concepts”).
2. Knowledge and application of visual tools and applications in business for building fast prototypes.
   You will learn the underlying logic and background for using fast visualizations in business. This includes an understanding of the setting, the psychology of the audience the choice of visualization and specific visual tools for the business setting.
3. 3D printing
   We will build a 3D printer from scratch in class and look into the basic tools and applications around 3D printing.

To give you an understanding of entrepreneurship from the perspective of start-ups, companies, and investors, we offer three special courses in Berlin and Düsseldorf. Experience the WHU start-up scene for yourself.

1. The Start-up Perspective – Sprint2Berlin
2. The Company Perspective – Corporate Entrepreneurship
3. Advanced Entrepreneurial Finance

Le Wagon is one of the leading coding schools, teaching creative people the technical skills they need to succeed. As part of its partnership with Le Wagon, WHU supports selected Master in Entrepreneurship students participating in Le Wagon's renowned nine-week coding bootcamp, fitting seamlessly into the program curriculum. Participants learn about software engineering, database architecture, and the technical work processes of successful start-ups. They gain experience using tools such as Ruby, Heroku, Stripe, Mandrill, and Algolia, ultimately enabling them to develop their own app.

When developing the curriculum for the Master in Entrepreneurship program, we consulted top entrepreneurs and managers to find out what skills the market actually needs. These experts repeatedly mentioned that software development and programming knowledge were a must-have. We offer an elective module that teaches these skills to meet this need through a special partnership with Codecademy, the world's leading coding platform. This partnership allows you to attend Codecademy courses in addition to regular WHU lectures, enabling you to learn the precise programming languages and IT skills you need to succeed.