Some important guidelines 

Background

Summary and key ideas

1. Program: The Program itself is a structured set of business activities with a supporting set of people and tools whose aim the successful launch of a new venture.
2. Entrepreneur: In this document, ‘entrepreneur’ refers to the individual or individuals who are committed to the venture and intend to pursue it as their job.
3. Project: In the terminology here, a project is a business idea being pursued by an entrepreneur. In most cases, the core of the project will be some technology around which the business concept and company are built.
4. Course: The set of courses described in this document and associated syllabi represent the implementation of the program within the MBA curriculum. The courses involve dividing the activities into discrete subsets and laying these activities out in a sequence. The courses will have clearly defined deliverables and process. The courses will have sufficiently flexibility to be adapted to the needs and state of a particular project. This flexibility will include carrying 3 or 6 credits (i.e., may last 1 or 2 terms) depending on the amount and difficulty of work that has to be completed for a given project at its current stage. Courses will be self-contained so that students may take any one, and do not have to take the sequence. The sequence proposed here is 3 “New Venture” courses:
• NV 1: Opportunity Evaluation
• NV 2: Strategy development
• NV 3: Operating plan development
• A successful outcome would be for a project to become a funded company at the end of this sequence. In that case, the project will create one instance of each course. Of course, many projects will not turn out to be successful, and work on them may be terminated at the completion of any one of these courses. Indeed, it is the intention of the program to hold ideas up to very critical scrutiny and terminate them when that seems to be the right decision.
5. Student: Students are interested individuals at Fuqua or at other schools at Duke who are registered for one of the courses in the sequence. Their work will advance the project and they will receive course credit. Students may enter the sequence at any point. In this respect, students are different from the entrepreneur, who is assumed to stay with the project through the entire program.
6. Instructor: The instructor is a Fuqua faculty member who will be ultimately responsible for evaluating the work of the entrepreneur/student team and assigning a grade.
7. Advisor: An advisor is a business person who will serve as a mentor for the team or as a subject matter expert available as a resource.
8. Under the idea proposed here, an aspiring entrepreneur will be matched with a promising technology or business idea. That entrepreneur will supply the commitment and driving energy to the project. Other students will be attracted to or recruited to the project as it progresses through the stages of development. These entrepreneur/student teams will enroll in the appropriate NV course, complete a piece of work and receive credit for their work. Assuming a positive outcome, the project will move to the next stage (next course in the sequence). The same entrepreneur with a possibly different set of students will enroll in the next course in the sequence, and so on.

Calendar

Entrepreneurs

Projects

Process

Activities

1. Commercial assessment: Market and technical feasibility. The objective of this phase is to determine whether the new business idea is worth pursuing.
2. Business plan: Business model, strategies in key functional areas. This phase should produce a fundable plan for the venture.
3. Company launch: Financing, company formation, initial team, board of directors and advisors. In this phase, the venture will graduate from the program and become an independent company.

People

• Dan Ariely, Professor, Marketing
• Ashish Arora, Professor, Strategy
  
• Rich Burton, Professor, Strategy
  
• Wes Cohen, Professor, Strategy; Faculty Director, Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation
• Jon Fjeld, Professor of the Practice, Strategy; Executive Director, Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation
• Jonathan Gindes, Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice-President of Business Development, Affinergy
  
• Donald Haile, Venture Partner, Fidelity
• Matthew Megaro, Executive-in-Residence, Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation
• Howie Rhee, Managing Director, Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation
• David Robinson, Professor, Finance; Director of Entrepreneurship Research, Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation
• Rich West, CEO, Advanced Liquid Logic
• Joe Velk, Contender Capital
  

Connection to degree programs

• To study the entrepreneurial process in depth
• To apply academic research to strategy and decision making in a new venture
• To use practice to help frame research questions
• To define a data collection model that derives from the critical management issues.

Infrastructure

• There are repeatable processes that can be improved systematically
• Learning from the various projects can be systematic and rigorous
• The application of ideas from academic research can be carefully controlled and evaluated
• The information and data from the various projects will be available for later study.

Consideration