Learn how to start a practical business in this course, where you will start your own business and understand the process of starting a business clearly.
Suggested by: Coursera (What is Coursera?)
No prior knowledge required
No unnecessary risks
This specialization is a guide to creating an independent business. We will cover a variety of topics essential to success in starting a business, including:
Instead of just describing what to do, we will focus on guiding you through the process of actually doing it. The final course will bring together all the tools and lessons discussed to enable you to launch your business.
It won’t necessarily be the business of your dreams, but it will be a functional business that will give you the ability to execute on something you’re passionate about.
This course is the first in a series on starting a business. Although creating a new venture is the main focus, this course is important for everyone. To build a successful business, it is not just what you do (technical execution), but also how you think. The course provides students with insights to change the way they think in order to maximize their chances of success.
Entrepreneurial thinking is critical to success as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial thinking is a unique characteristic in terms of its importance. There is no other trait, personality, innate entrepreneurial tendencies, training, or demographic profile that all successful entrepreneurs share, whether it is Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, or the neighborhood florist or farmer.
The course provides students with an understanding of the characteristics and perspectives of entrepreneurial thinking, and the process of acquiring it. We encourage students to come with an open mind and a willingness to deeply explore the new business ventures they are undertaking. The course introduces concepts that allow an individual to begin a transformative process in the way they think in general, and specifically about business. This new way of thinking can have a positive impact not only on them, but also on their family and community.
Where do great business ideas come from? We’ve all been thinking about exciting business ideas for years. In this course, we’ll explore how to use experiential tools and other techniques to generate ideas and talk about how to evaluate good ideas from bad ones. The goal is to focus on a business idea that you’re not only passionate about but also one that has real market application.
According to Stephen Blank, starting a new business, or any new venture, is essentially a prototype. Therefore, the startup process essentially becomes a learning process to improve that business prototype into a kind of finished product that can be expanded and copied.
The days of 40-page business plans are long gone, but the role of planning in the business creation process is still very important. In this course, we will explore the important elements that you need to research in detail before starting a business. Acting without a plan is a recipe for disaster and we will ensure that you have a strong foundation for future actions.
The focus of planning here is on learning. It is unrealistic for a person to document in detail all the actions they need to take to succeed in a new venture when they (and sometimes no one else) have any experience with the new venture and the conditions they are likely to encounter. Therefore, a business plan based largely on assumptions and aggregate data that are not applicable is replaced by a business model that organizes the central assumptions that determine what value the business will offer to whom, and how it will make money.
The course will guide students through the process of systematically testing and validating these assumptions, obtaining specific and applicable data, and then showing students how to use the validated assumptions to produce pro forma financial statements directly related to the operations and resources based on this business model.
Like building a house, the foundation of your business provides the framework for success. A business built on a weak foundation will struggle to succeed. We’ll look at some of the most pressing issues an entrepreneur must address as they build the right framework for their business.
This course is the last course in the series of courses before the turning point experience where the student will start their business. All the activities related to the final preparation for the launch should be considered like the preparations for a NASA launch before the final countdown. These are the activities related to starting a business that will be covered in this course.
The goal of the course is for you to have a document that lists all the actions you need to take and all the things you need to think about before launching a business with instructions on how to take the actions and how to think about these things.
Throughout the course, we have emphasized the importance of engaging with the market, and the possibility of the market coming back to you with feedback that will reshape your business and maximize your chances of success. As with the entire series, the feedback you will receive through the peer review assignments for this course and the Turning Point course is such a valuable opportunity.
It’s a cliché, but it’s still very true. Experience is the best teacher. It’s also the best confidence booster. It’s time for you to take action! The concepts and skills introduced throughout the courses in the series are applied in the Turning Point course where you will start a real business. This will not be a business idea outlined on paper, but a functional business with legal status in your jurisdiction, developed within your available resources, and from which revenue can emerge.
One of the great advantages of this series is the business development environment provided by the learner population. At the tipping point stage of the course, your thousands of learners become useful consultants who can improve and add value to your business idea, they may also be potential customers or at least allow you to ask about the likely responses from potential customers.
With the experience of launching this project, and the execution capability and confidence gained from that experience, we hope you will repeat the process and launch another project or a larger version of this project. Hopefully, you will go on to launch more, and more, and more, as you break “practice makes perfect.”
