[Centraal] Interessante online universiteitslessen en lezingen!

[XiaoDi]

Free courses from the University of Virginia, starting January 28th 2013 (5 weeks long) and April 29th 2013 (4 weeks long):

 

Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses, Part I

 

Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses, Part II

 

About the Course

 

Most entrepreneurship courses focus on how to start a business. Few focus on the next big entrepreneurial inflection point: how do you successfully grow an existing private business? This is the focus of this Course. It is based on the instructor's research and thirty years of real-world experience advising private growth companies.

 

This Course will challenge how you think about growth; give you tools to help you plan for growth, assess the preconditions to grow, and manage the risks of growth. You will study stories of how five different private businesses faced their growth challenges.

 

Growth, if not properly managed, can overwhelm a business, destroying value and in many cases even causing the business to fail. However, the research shows that every growth business faces common challenges. You can learn from others' experience—you do not have to "reinvent the wheel".

 

The Course format is case based. Each case tells a compelling story. You will learn from Julie Allinson, Susan Fellers, Dave Lindsey, Parik Laxinarayan and Eric Barger. In addition, each week, we will discuss a different content theme. In Weeks and 2 and 5, you will engage in Workshops where you will be asked to use and apply the Course tools and concepts to create growth strategies for two different real-life businesses. You will have the opportunity to create a Course Community of fellow-students to learn from each other as the Course progresses.

 

You will learn about the: "3 Myths of Growth"; the "Truth About Growth"; why growth is like "Mother Nature"; the "Gas Pedal" approach to growth; the all important "4 Ps" of how to grow; and how to scale a business strategically.

 

More business courses from Coursera

[Jeroen Bakker]

Een interessant topic, zeker gezien het feit dat er steeds meer (Amerikaanse) universitaire onderdelen online toegankelijk worden gemaakt. En daar zit zeker wat bij voor ondernemers!

 

Bij deze mijn suggestie, vers van de pers:

 

The Lean LaunchPad

 

“The Lean Launchpad,” focuses on the core principles of building a startup and avoiding novice mistakes that lead many companies to a premature end. Blank additionally aims to clear up nearly half a century’s worth of misconceptions concerning exactly what a startup can be.

 

“We used to think that of a startup as a smaller version of a large company,” said Blank. “We now know that a startup is something very different, very unique.”

 

Blank, who is known for his teachings in customer development, will focus on the process of identifying and engaging those first customers throughout the nine lecture course. Other topics include finding your minimum viable product, monetization, growing customers, and developing partnerships, among others.

 

Hoofddocent is Steve Blank, auteur van The Four Steps to the Epiphany en bekend docent aan Stanford:

 

Steve Blank is a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Translation: he has failed and--more often--succeeded, in a 21-year career building 8 Valley startups, including several with major IPO's. Along the way, he's learned an incredible amount, and has spent the last decade sharing what he's learned with entrepreneurs all over the world. Author of two famous books on entrepreneurship, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, and--new this year--The Startup Owner's Manual, Steve teaches entrepreneurship at Udacity, Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, and other major universities worldwide.