For nearly forty years, IAP has provided members of the MIT community (students, faculty, staff, and alums) with a unique opportunity to organize, sponsor and participate in a wide variety of activities. Entrepreneurship has been a part of that tradition for a significant portion of that history. This year we highlight a few courses of interest to our entrepreneurial communty, including several new offerings. We hope you’ll join us in these activities!
15.S21 Special Seminar in Management - The Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans (was 15.975)
with Joseph G. Hadzima, Jr.
Tuesday-Thursday, January 17-19, 24-26, 6-9pm, 34-101
The nuts and bolts of preparing a Business Plan will be explored in this 22nd annual course offering. The course is open to members of the M.I.T. Community and to others interested in entrepreneurship. Recommended for persons who are interested in starting or are involved in a new business. Persons planning to enter the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition should find the course particularly useful. In the past approximately 50% of the class has been from Sloan and 50% from the Science, Engineering and Architecture Schools. This "cross-school" course has resulted in the formation of $100K Competition Teams and a number of successful startups.
15.S24 Special Seminar in Management - From MIT to CEO: Technologists Leading Startup Ventures (was 15.978)
with Noubar Afeyan
Tuesday - Thursday, January 17 - 19, 3-6pm, 4-237
Startup ventures form a special class of enterprise that translates innovations into commercial offerings often disrupting large markets.This course will focus on the characteristics, requirements and role of a technologist-CEO in a startup. We will analyze the role from many points of view including as chief strategist, fundraiser, recruiter, motivator, promoter, market developer, sales person, visionary, communicator and paranoid optimist.
15.S25 Special Seminars in Management - Social Entrepreneurship: The Story of One Laptop Per Child (was 15.997)
with Charles Kane, Walter Bender, and Robert Hacker
Monday - Friday, January 23 - 27, 4-6pm, E51-149
This course explores the challenges and successes of the social entrepreneurship adventure ‘One Laptop Per Child’. The project involved many engineering, business, and distribution decisions that one would encounter in any other social entrepreneurship venture. The professors explore and describe the current state and future vision of the project. Students are invited to participate in helping impact the direction of the future of the project. Students should sign up on Websis by December 21st, 2010.
15.S51 Special Seminar in Management: Hacking IAP
with Bill Aulet, R. Colin Kennedy
Monday - Friday, January 9 - 13, 10am - 6pm, E40-160
Students spend one week hacking entrepreneurial ideas in cross-disciplinary teams. Students will participate in hand on sessions on entrepreneurship, team building, agile product management, sales, and fundraising in this workshop-like course. Actionable steps in business creation, including prototypes, customers, team composition, go-to-market plan/progress, hypotheses that have been tested.
Watch a video with information about this course online here.
We all hear about those who win “The Business Lottery”: VC funding, big acquisitions, prestigious grants, best-sellers, etcetera. Is it healthy for the rest of us to be aiming for these rewards when planning our own business models? What are the alternatives? We will publicize small, local businesses that are on their way to a big impact. Local entrepreneurs will present their powerful case studies and reflect on how they are able to do what they love full-time. The class will examine how emerging technologies enable new business models, spur new business types, and allow for personal fulfillment.
Guest lecturers will provide the guiding business and personal philosophies and reveal the practical and numerical details around their management of people, services, and finances (so often glossed over in business and business education). In addition, each guest lecturer will bring a concrete problem or project from their own business, to challenge participants and gather productive, useful, and creative responses. Class lecturers will periodically facilitate open brainstorming: new business models, new and social media best-practices, imagining sustainability solutions around participants’ own projects, and so forth. Finally, class lecturers will facilitate traditional negotiations, management, and group-work learning games such as the red-green game and others.
15.S53 Special Seminar in Management, Viral Marketing: Disseminating the Brand and Message
with Doug Levin
Tuesday - Thursday, January 10 - 12, 3:00-6:00pm, E51-335
Viral marketing and videos have the potential to disseminate brand and marketing messages to a worldwide audience of potential influencers and buyers. When campaigns are unsuccessful viral marketing is portrayed as random; when campaigns are viral marketing is portrayed as ingenious. The truth is somewhere in-between these extremes.
This course is for people who want to understand how large companies; startups and other businesses successfully use B2B and B2C viral marketing. Successful viral marketing campaigns have a combination of elements; leverage the marketing mix and technology at their disposal in ways that increase the probability of success. This seminar will also examine unsuccessful viral videos; integrated marketing strategies that include a marketing mix and how marketers use viral marketing to position their brands and increase awareness, adoption and sales.