Whether you are in middle school, high school, an undergraduate, a graduate student, or a corporate executive, Idea Factory offers a broad array of entrepreneurship and innovation courses tailored for you.
ENES140
Students explore dynamic company startup topics by working in teams to design a new venture. This multi-disciplinary course helps students to learn the basic business, strategy, and leadership skills needed to launch new ventures. Topics include learning how to assess the feasibility of a startup venture, as well as how to apply best practices for planning, launching, and managing new companies. Students discuss a wide range of issues of importance and concern to entrepreneurs and learn to recognize opportunities, assess the skills and talents of successful entrepreneurs, and learn models that help them navigate uncertainty. (Scholarship in Practice)
ENES210
Undergraduate course helps students learn the principles of entrepreneurial opportunity analysis and decision-making in an increasingly technically-inclined society. (Scholarship in Practice & I-series)
ENES460
Undergraduate course offered online and on-campus helps students learn the processes and skills needed to launch and manage new technology ventures, with a focus on business plan development.
ENES461
Using a cognitive theoretical framework the course examines the integration of motivation, emotions and information processing modes to make complex entrepreneurial decisions in fast pace technology venture environments. The course is an informed and interesting exploration of entrepreneurial cognition with both theoretical and methodological contributions.
ENES462
Marketing of high-technology products occurs in turbulent environments, and requires rapid decision making with incomplete information. Innovations are introduced at frequent intervals, research-and-development spending is vital, and there are high mortality rates for both products and businesses. The course will provide a balance of conceptual discussions and applied/hands-on activities.
ENES463
Emphasizes how the technology entrepreneur can use strategic management of innovation and technology to enhance firm performance. It helps students to understand the process of technological change; the ways that firms come up with innovations; the strategies that firms use to benefit from innovation; and the process of formulating strategy.
ENES464
Focuses on the need for every entrepreneur and innovator to understand the global market in today's hypercompetitive world, and to appreciate how to compete effectively in domestic markets by managing international competitors, suppliers, and influencers. Students develop skills to identify and manage opportunities on a global basis.
ENES466
Focuses on the challenges of leading and financing new technology ventures. Leadership topics include team selection and formation, aligning rewards with relative contributions of team members, and how early decisions can enable or prevent founders from achieving results that align with their individual motivations for becoming an entrepreneur. Essential tools and methods for building a strong financial foundation for a new technology venture are examined. Includes important accounting principles as well as methods for keeping financial control of the technology venture. Insights are shared on navigating the multitude of financial barriers that may block your entrepreneurial success, as well as how to grow the technology venture from concept through launch.
ENES471
This course will highlight the critical legal and business issues entrepreneurs face as they build and launch a new venture. We will explore real world scenarios, and address legal and business issues from the moment entrepreneurs conceive of the idea to all of the important junctures along the path to success. Significant attention is placed on new venture formation, intellectual property management, and financing arrangements.
ENES660
Provides a comprehensive survey of product management and its growing role in producing technology-driven products that customers love. Guides students through the product lifecycle and market lifecycle, diving into the competencies needed at each stage. Topics include vision setting and startup strategy and development, engineering approaches based on customer involvement and product stage, the various types of innovation at each stage of the lifecycle, and how the product manager leads through it all. It teaches the basics of product discovery, product delivery, and the core-context model for managing products through maturity.
ENES662
Focuses on the content, methods, and models for new venture opportunity assessment and validation. Learn how to identify and analyze entrepreneurial opportunities for technology-based ventures by first understanding their personal self and decision-making factors. Examine the challenges and opportunities within industries and markets of interest.
ENES663
Emphasizes how innovative leaders use strategic management of innovation and technology to enhance firm performance. It helps students understand the process of technological change; the ways that firms come up with innovations; the strategies that firms use to benefit from innovation; and it provides frameworks for analyzing these frameworks and teaches students how to apply them.
ENES664
Focuses on how to create and deliver value for customers and how to sustainably extract value for the venture. Develop business models that encompass the product or service, customers, and the economic engine that will deliver on venture objectives.
ENES665
Introduces new and powerful tools to boost creative problem solving. Participants rediscover their personal thinking preferences, identify and eliminate mental blocks, and enhance their communication and teaming skills. Students unlock their creative potential, and explore win-win applications to define and solve problems of different kinds.
ENES666
Enables students to transition from creative, innovative, design thinking methods to prototyping and testing their products and services. Emphasis is placed on an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to engineering design, concurrent engineering, design for manufacturing, industrial design, and the business of product development.
ENES667
Provides an orientation to key marketing concepts critical to marketing technology-based products and services. Identify market opportunities, understand customer preferences, evaluate market acceptance, and devise the appropriate approach to markets.
ENES668
Provides insight into the innovation process in corporations and the unique challenges and opportunities that managers and corporate entrepreneurs face in translating innovative ideas into successful results, from opportunity recognition to new venture corporation.
ENES670
Provides the essential tools and know-how to build a strong financial foundation for a new technology venture. Examines accounting principles as well as methods for keeping firm financial control of your enterprise. Insights are shared on navigating financial barriers as well as how to raise the right amount of capital at the right time from the right source.
ENES671
Highlights the critical legal and business issues entrepreneurs face as they build and launch a new venture. Explore real world scenarios, and address legal and business issues from ideation to all of the important junctures along the path to success. Significant attention is placed on new venture formation, intellectual property management, and financing arrangements.
ENES672
Helps students to learn the processes and skills needed to launch and manage technology startup ventures. Students learn how to apply best practices for planning, launching, and managing new companies. Students will discuss a wide range of issues of importance and concern to technology entrepreneurs, to include how to navigate uncertainty.
ENES673
Provides the essential tools and skills to build a strong financial foundation for designing, developing, and managing new products within established companies and organizations. Examines accounting principles as well as methods for managing the financials of the product. Discusses navigating the multitude of financial barriers that may block success, as well as how to raise the right amount of capital at the right time from the right source, with an emphasis on internal company financing.
ENES674
Explores the evolution of modern management methods for operations and product development. Evaluates production and operation methods from inception to factory-based models of productivity, through the quality and lean movements, to the explosion of productivity with modern approaches. Focuses on how to effectively run large-scale agile teams with agile engineering at its core.
ENES676
Explores key negotiation techniques, how to apply these techniques, and their application to real-world scenarios. Establishes an understanding of deal-making, and creates a foundation for exploring the concepts of agreements, contracts, conflicts, and how the resulting transactions formed the foundation for modern scaled economies. Examines reputation effects, customer lifetime value, the basics of civil and criminal law, and how these have formed to constrain our interactions in modern society.
ENES677
Provides a comprehensive understanding of making decisions under uncertainty for products, portfolios, and programs across various industries and environments. Focuses on the use of Bayesian methods for informing decisions on products and programs when directing experiments. Examines the testing of product ideas throughout the lifecycle, from customer discover, to product discovery, to product design and optimization, to channel testing and marketing for growth.
ENES680
Focuses on building a product enterprise through lean product portfolio management. Defines the conceptual groundwork that enables achieving the vision of a customer-centric value creation business model centered around lean principles. Explains the details of building a scaled product enterprise and explores alignment of organizational support functions with a product framework that lays the pathway for a sustainable value maximizing enterprise at scale.