Class Central is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Entrepreneurship I: Laying the Foundation

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign via Coursera

Go to class Write review

Details

Go to class

Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

18 hours 16 minutes
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Beginner
Subtitles

Arabic, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Russian, English, Spanish, Thai, Indonesian, Kazakh, Hindi, Swedish, Korean, Greek, Chinese, Ukrainian, Japanese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, Hungarian, Bengali, Pashto, Urdu, Azerbaijani, Farsi

Found in

Part of

Overview

Google, IBM & Meta Certificates – 40% Off

One plan covers every Professional Certificate on Coursera.

Unlock All Certificates

This course will explore the earlier stages of the entrepreneurial venture process across four modules. The modules will examine the nature of growth and error in entrepreneurial settings and how to manage resources in those settings. In addition, the modules will explore the emergence of entrepreneurial opportunities, the formulation of ideas in relation to those opportunities, and how those opportunities and ideas influence entrepreneurial phenomena. Finally, the course will focus on how business concepts underlie compelling entrepreneurial missions that provide guidance to the evolution of a venture’s business model and future strategic planning. You will be able to: - Develop a foundational understanding of the entrepreneurial process - Consider the relationship between growth and error - Understand how particular opportunities influence entrepreneurial phenomena This course is part of Gies College of Business’ suite of online programs, including the iMBA and iMSM. Learn more about admission into these programs and explore how your Coursera work can be leveraged if accepted into a degree program at https://degrees.giesbusiness.illinois.edu/idegrees/.

Syllabus

Orientation and Module 1: Foundations of Entrepreneurship

This module introduces entrepreneurship as a learnable process rather than a stereotype, and shows how ideas, decisions, and support emerge in real ventures. It examines where entrepreneurial ideas come from, why early-stage entrepreneurship is difficult under uncertainty, and how founders can navigate the personal and practical challenges of building something new. The module also highlights guiding principles for early-stage action and explains why pitching is a core skill for winning support.

Module 2: Customer Discovery

This module focuses on identifying real customer problems before committing to a solution. It introduces customer discovery, jobs-to-be-done, problem quality, market sizing, industry structure, and intellectual property regimes as tools for identifying opportunities and evaluating whether they are worth pursuing. The central goal is to help learners understand not just whether a problem exists, but whether it is severe, frequent, large enough, and structurally viable for a venture.

Module 3: Building and Managing Founding Teams

This module focuses on entrepreneurship as a team sport: how founding teams come together, how to evaluate co-founder ﬁt and how to deﬁne roles, as well as the dynamics of team culture, ethics, equity splits, and governance. We build a recurring framework known as the "Three Rs"—Relationships, Roles, and Rewards—that shapes many of the most consequential decisions a founder will make.

Module 4: Business Models, Positioning, and Value Capture

This module moves from understanding a problem to designing a viable business around it. It explains how value propositions, positioning, business model archetypes, revenue models, channels, early traction, and strategic alignment work together to create and capture value. The central goal is to help learners design a business model that ﬁts the customer, the market, and the venture’s resources.