Undergraduate Course: Entrepreneurship and Innovation Project (INFR09053)
Course Outline
| School | School of Informatics |
College | College of Science and Engineering |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 9 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Project course enables Informatics students to approach real life problems with an entrepreneurial perspective, through developing their ability to apply disciplinary knowledge, resources and academic skills. The teaching environment for the EIP course will be in-person, face-to-face, with a core teaching facilitator who organises the weekly lesson plans, the guest lecturers, and who serves as a facilitator and introducer of weekly learning. Teaching will be delivered in a way that enables students to build on their entrepreneurial knowledge each week through formal and informal interactions with the course organiser. |
| Course description |
The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Project covers three levels of cognitive domains (Knowledge, Comprehension, and Application): it exposes the enrolled students to entrepreneurial knowledge, and then teaches them how to explain and represent their new knowledge through applying it to constructing a solution to a problem that they have identified. Students will be assessed on their ability to develop and execute a semester-long project and team management plan. On a weekly basis, each individual in the team will be required to reflect on/provide a personal perspective of the effectiveness of their teamwork. Like a real-life business with co-founders, the EIP course requires students face and address challenges as a team.
Student teams will be provided with formative assessment throughout the semester on the basis of their contributions to weekly reflective exercises, which evaluate their progress on collaboratively planning for and presenting a group business plan as their final project. All students will be required to attend weekly business planning workshops, which will guide students on how to research for and populate sections of their business plans that will be assessed as a summative portfolio of each team's collaborative learning journey throughout the semester. Weekly class attendance and effective team work are both essential in order for students to get a good grade for EIP.
The EIP course provides students with an opportunity to define and engage with an entrepreneurial project that they can continue pursue beyond the 1-semester of the EIP course delivery.
The course organiser of EIP will provide students with a guided learning pathway, which enables the teaching team (organiser and tutors) to get to know the individual teams 'intimately' through the semester, so as to offer them individualised/team-specific feedback within the context of the larger learning outcomes and with regard to the components of the business plan that are assessed for a final team and individual grade.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | Restricted to registered Year-3 undergraduate students in the School of Informatics. |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | As above. |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2023/24, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 64 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 10,
Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 25,
Revision Session Hours 10,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
151 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
100% coursework
The coursework consists of:
1) an individual take-home test in which students need to demonstrate their individual comprehension of constructing and explaining financial statements for a business plan. (20%)
2) a brief essay reflecting on the student¿s experience of working in a team throughout the course, based on a synthesis of their regular blog entries. (30%)
3) a business plan, including a website and pitch, submitted as a group.
(50%) |
| Feedback |
Students will be given formative feedback throughout the course, so as to help them make better-informed decisions that are reflected in their final team business plan. During the formative assessment and feedback for the students (weeks 3, 5, and 7, and 9), students will be the key decision makers on the directions in which they will take their entrepreneurial projects. Students will provide an annotated outline of their business plans/website wireframes during week 7 of the course. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- identify appropriate market segments for their innovations and justify decision to choose one market over another
- communicate the process through which they achieve their final product to stakeholders
- differentiate and appraise the different aspects of business models, financial plans and customer channels
- collaboratively construct a business plan and model associated financial statements (for their entrepreneurial idea)
- work as a member of a team to demonstrate multidisciplinary application of their Informatics' knowledge and skills to delivering an entrepreneurial solution
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Reading List
Sen, Amartya. Development As Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2001.
Aulet, William, and Marius Ursache. Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup / Bill Aulet; Illustrated by Marius Ursache. 1st edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013.
Kidder, Tracy. The Soul of a New Machine / Tracy Kidder. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982
Article readings on Edward Altman Z-Score model for predicting Bankruptcy. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
At the core of its learning outcomes, the EIP course provides students the opportunity to practically apply the courses entrepreneurial lessons in real-time through weekly in-class teamwork on their business plans in 5 main ways, which also aim to enhance their graduate attributes:
1. The EIP course is an enquiry - problem-based course that supports students in finding and justifying the entrepreneurial solution to a problem that they have agreed on as part of a collaborative team decision
2. Students in EIP will actively discover the solution to their problem by building on new knowledge each week, and reflecting their learning and entrepreneurial vision through evaluating their weekly effectiveness as a team
3. At the end of the course, students will be required to provide a summative report of the knowledge that they have gained as a team through an audio-visual presentation of their business plan
4. For the EIP course, student learning is mainly designed to be conveyed teamwork/peer-to-peer sharing that is embodied by in-class and face-to-face collaboration, group tutorials, experiences and business case studies sharing, guest lecturers, final project portfolio, and critical engagement and reflections throughout the semester
5. Engagement between students and teachers/mentors for the EIP course will encourage social debate, shared-social inquiry, and peer-to-peer learning |
| Keywords | Viable product,target customers,sales and marketing,intellectual property |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Ndalinoshisho Cairney
Tel:
Email: ncairney@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mrs Michelle Bain
Tel: (0131 6)51 7607
Email: michelle.bain@ed.ac.uk |
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