New Venture Thinking

Entrepreneurship has grown into one of the most attractive and potentially rewarding career choices for creative and business minded individuals. Designing your own venture, developing your market, engaging with your customers, managing your team and yourself; all this and more is required of the entrepreneur and offers extensive opportunity to work creatively and practice innovation. Entrepreneurship is also one of the driving forces of socio-economic change with the entrepreneur as its key agent. Thus, engaging in an entrepreneurial endeavour harbours the possibility to achieve a real impact on the way we live and potentially even change the world.

In New Venture Thinking you will learn concepts and frameworks that will enable you to envision, design, and construct impactful, sustainable entrepreneurial ventures.

In doing so, NVT goes beyond delivering just a set of “entrepreneurial tools”:
Instead, you will learn and experiment with a paradigm (worldview, processes, practices) designed to enable you to recognise opportunities and address them with practical, innovative solutions that are meaningful and valuable in the context of the 21st century.

New Venture Thinking is trans-disciplinary and its contents are based on the latest academic research and best practices in systems theory, integral theory, social psychology, design thinking, and entrepreneurship.
NVT therefore is a challenging module and accordingly, memorisation of theories and case studies with the purpose of playing them back in exams will not suffice. Instead, you will be expected to think independently and proactively about ventures and sustainable venturing; from the formulation, development, and creation of a venture to ensuring its sustainability in the broader systemic context.

We hope that over the course of the next eleven weeks, you will discover and enable your own entrepreneurial potential.

Aim

  • To equip you with a conceptual framework and corresponding toolset which enables you to analyse, design, and develop sustainable ventures.
  • To train your ability to think independently and critically, in particular when faced with unstructured, unbounded problem situations.

Learning Outcomes

  • Understand the fundamentals of integral entrepreneurship
  • Recognise opportunities in ecological, social, and cultural challenges • Design, develop, and deliver sustainable ventures
  • Evaluate ventures integrally
  • Deal confidently with unstructured, unbounded problem situations
  • Communicate ideas and concepts concisely and convincingly

Structure

[table colwidth=”20|150″ width=”500″ colalign=”center|left”]
Week, Topic
1,Introduction to New Venture Thinking
2,Entrepreneurship and the Entrepreneurial Process
3,”Uncertainty, Opportunity and Opportunity Context”
4,”Introspection, Analysis, and Vision”
5,”Value Creation & Appreciation (IVC Framework)”
6,Designing an Offering (HCD)
7,”Value Destruction & Sustainability (New Context, New Opportunity)”
8,Venture Design – The Business Model
9,Venture Design – The Venture System
10,”Managing Yourself, Managing Your Team”
11,Revision + Q&A
[/table]

Recommended Reading

  • A Theory of Everything – An Integral Vision for Business: Ken Wilber, Shambhala Publications, ISBN 1-570-62855-6.
  • To Have or to Be? : Erich Fromm, Continuum Publishing Group, ISBN 0-826-41738-8
  • The Path to Hope: Stephan Hessel and Edgar Morin, Other Press, ISBN 1-590-51560-9
  • General System Theory – Foundations, Development, Applications: Ludwig von Bertalanffy, George Braziller Inc, ISBN 0-807-60453-4
  • Theory of Society Vol. 1: Niklas Luhmann, Stanford University Press, ISBN 0-804-73950-1
  • Realities and Relationships – Soundings in Social Construction: Kenneth J. Gregen, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-74931-6
  • The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World: David Abram, Vintage Books, ISBN 0-679-77639-7
  • Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth: Buckminster Fuller, Lars Muller Publishers, ISBN 3-037-78126-2
  • How much is Enough?: Robert Skidelsky, Allen Lane Publishing, ISBN 1-846-14448-5
  • Coaching: James Flaherty, Butterworth-Heinemann, ISBN 1-856-17816-1
  • Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Shunryu Suzuki, Shambhala Publications, ISBN 1-590-30849-3
  • A New Earth – Create a Better Life: Eckhart Tolle, Penguin, ISBN 0-141-03941-8
  • Cradle to Cradle – Remaking the Way We Make Things: Michael Braungart – William McDonough, Vintage Books, ISBN 0-099-053547-5
  • Deep Simplicity – Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life: John Gribbin, Penguin, ISBN 0-141-00722-2
  • Thinking Course – Powerful Tools to Transform your Thinking: Edward de Bono, BBC Active, ISBN 1-406-61202-2
  • Zero to One – Notes on Start-ups or How to Build the Future: Peter Thiel, Virgin Books, ISBN 0-753-55518-2
  • Human Centred Design Toolkit – A step by step guide to the elements of human-centred design: IDEO.org, ISBN 978-0-9914063-02 (also online for free at www.designkit.org)
  • Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want: Alexander Osterwalder, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 1-118-96805-0
  • The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses: Eric Ries, Portfolio Penguin, ISBN 0-670-92160-2
  • The Four Steps To The Epiphany – Successful Strategies for Products that Win: Steve Blank, K&S Ranch, ISBN 0-989-20050-7
  • Ten Types of Innovation – The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs: Larry Keeley and Helen Walters, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 1-118-50424-0
  • SCRUM – A Revolutionary Approach To Building Teams, Beating Deadlines, an Boosting Productivity: Jeff Sutherland, Random House Business Books, ISBN 1-847-94109-5

NEWSLETTER

Who is behind NVT?

Habib Lesevic

Habib Lesevic

Your contact for New Venture Thinking

Get in touch with us to find out more about the module and its contents or host it at your institution.