Entrepreneurship is a way of looking at business that is focused on opportunities, creativity, and innovation. It is also about having a passion for doing the things that are important to you and making the world a better place by solving problems in innovative ways. It is about challenge and persistence. It is about the development of an enterprising mindset and being the kind of person who sees problems as opportunities and is not afraid of doing the hard work of building something from nothing.
In this unit you will learn about the elements of an entrepreneurial mindset and how to cultivate these traits and behaviours in your own life. You will learn how to use design thinking to reframe problems as potential opportunities. You will learn how to come up with new business and social enterprise ideas, and how to evaluate those ideas and find the most promising ones amongst them. You will learn how to use the lean startup methodology to build a business that learns quickly and outpaces its competitors. You will learn how to build viable and sustainable business models around your own innovative product ideas and how to evolve those business models over time in response to lessons you learn as you continue to develop your business. Finally, you will learn the important art of pitching and how to convince other people to join you in your entrepreneurial mission, as cofounders, employees, or investors.
While we often think of entrepreneurship as being solely concerned with new businesses, in this unit you will learn how to apply the tools, skills and mindsets of entrepreneurship more broadly. You will learn how to apply the tools you learn about in this unit to your work within larger organisations and to not-for-profit businesses and social enterprises as well. By the end of this unit, you will be equipped with a range of methods that you can use to develop innovative new ideas and put them into practice.