Minor in Digital Ventures and Entrepreneurship
Description
The Minor concept
A minor gives you the opportunity of having a second specialization in your degree. The minor is a bundle of three electives that can be chosen separately but if chosen together rewards a minor.
Purpose
This minor is offered by the MSc in Business Administration and Ebusiness programme, and builds entrepreneurial as well as technical competencies.
The minor comprises three courses with strong educational linkages between theory and practice. The courses complement each other by providing insight into current academic work (“Foundations of Digital Ventures”), applying concepts and ideas to the real world (“Digital Entrepreneurship”), and building methodological skills to solve-real world problems (“Service Design and Innovation”). After completing the three courses, students will be equipped with theoretical and practical tools to explain, design, create, and assess entrepreneurial initiatives drawing from digital technologies. The minor combines traditional modes of instruction (e.g., lectures, seminars) with hands-on sessions (e.g., workshops/studio work, design inquiry) during which solutions to real-world problems are designed using digital technology.
Structure
The below table lists the structure and the ECTS credits of the individual courses. The course descriptions are available in the online course catalogue. Direct links are inserted in the below table.
| Course | ECTS |
|---|---|
| Foundations of Digital Ventures (B) | 7.5 |
| Digital Entrepreneurship (B) | 7.5 |
| Service Design and Innovation (T) | 7.5 |
Content
Foundations of Digital Ventures
This course provides the conceptual foundations of digital ventures, which include initiatives within and beyond traditional firm boundaries that rest on the substantial use of digital technologies. Such activity has attracted significant scholarly interest, offering students the opportunity to learn about the unique attributes of digital technologies and the entrepreneurial activity that they enable. The course introduces research streams on entrepreneurship and ventures, covering ideation, creation, and operation of entrepreneurial offerings within and beyond traditional firm boundaries.
Digital Entrepreneurship
The course translates theoretical and methodological skills into practice in order to enable students to start a company. The course will treat digital technologies as both (1) an outcome of entrepreneurship, and (2) an enabler of the process of entrepreneurship. Developing new entrepreneurial competencies, the students will work in groups toward the successful commercial offering of entrepreneurial initiatives to the marketplace. The course will cover phases of an ideal entrepreneurial process from ideation, over product development, launch, and commercialization. The expected output from the class is a portfolio document containing a video pitch, presentation deck including a business plan, go-to-market strategy, and a prototype.
Service Design and Innovation
Service Design aims to improve the quality of interaction between an offering and its users. This course offers a highly interdisciplinary approach paying attention to deep and continuous stakeholder engagement. To that end, students are expected to establish contact with a company within the first two weeks of class. The company can be active in any industry limited only by the expectation that the case company should be relevant for a service design intervention. The course is intended as a practical and industry-relevant design course, aiming to develop a service design attitude to inform working prototypes. Key tools cover UX oriented sketching, service design mapping, blueprinting, prototyping, scenario exploration, personas, and visualization.
Examinations
The minor consists of the examinations listed below. The learning objectives and the regulations of the individual examinations are prescribed in the online course catalogue. Direct links to the individual examinations are inserted in the table below.
| Exam name | Exam form | Gradingscale | Internal/external exam | ECTS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foundations of Digital Ventures | Home assignment - written product | 7-point grading scale | Internal exam | 7.5 |
| Digital Entrepreneurship | Oral exam based on written product | 7-point grading scale | Internal exam | 7.5 |
| Service design and Innovation | Oral exam based on written product | 7-point grading scale | Internal exam | 7.5 |
Prerequisites for registering for the exam – compulsory activities
The following courses have compulsory assignments or requirements about active class participation. Further specifications and regulations are listed in the relevant course description in the online course catalogue, see the below links.
| Course | Number of mandatory activities |
|---|---|
| Foundations of Digital Ventures (B) | 1 |
| Service Design and Innovation (T) | 2 |
Further information
Minor Coordinators:
Michel Avital, Professor, Department of Digitalization
Philipp Hukal, Assistant Professor, Department of Digitalization
Study Board
The minor in Digital Ventures and Entrepreneurship is offered by the Study Board for BSc and MSc in Business Administration and Information Systems, MSc in Business Administration and Ebusiness, and MSc in Business Administration and Data Science.
How to sign up
If you like to sign up for the Minor in Digital Ventures and Entrepreneurship, you have to select CBUSM2000U when you sign up for electives. You will then subsequently be signed up for all three courses. You do not have to select all three courses individually.
CBUSV2038U - Foundations of Digital Ventures is an elective (B course for students at Ebusiness)
CBUSV2022U Digital Entrepreneurship is an elective (B course for students at Ebusiness)
CBUSV2037U - Service Design and Innovation is an elective (T course for students at Ebusiness)