Important note: This course is part of an 6 ECTS module consisting of the three courses 'Startup Engineering', 'Startup Engineering Project' and 'Entrepreneurship Management', which have to be taken together in one semester.

Startups are temporary, team-based organizations, which can form both within and outside of established companies, to pursue one central objective: taking a new venture idea to market by designing a business model that can be scaled to a full-grown company. In this course, students will form startup teams around self-selected ideas and run through the process just like real startups would do in the first three months of intensive work. Startup Engineering takes an incremental and iterative approach, in that it favors variety and alternatives over one detailed, linear five-year business plan to reach steady state operations. From a problem solving and systems thinking perspective, student teams create different possible versions of a new venture and alternative hypotheses about value creation for customers and value capture vis-à-vis competitors. To test critical hypotheses early on, student teams engage in an evidence-based, experimental trial-and-error learning process that measures real progress.
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
· Apply a modern innovation toolkit relevant in both the corporate & startup world
· Analyze given business opportunities in terms of its constituent elements
· Design new business models by gathering and combining relevant ideas, facts and information 
· Evaluate business opportunities and derive judgment about next steps & decisions
Course language is English, but participants can decide to give their graded presentations in German. Students are invited to apply to this course module already with a startup idea and/ or team, but this is not a requirement! We will form teams and ideas in the beginning of the course. Class meetings have alternate intervals of lecture inputs, teamwork, mentoring, and peer feedback. Attendance is mandatory for at least 80% of class time due to large proportion of teamwork sessions.
Student teams give three presentations and submit them with backup analyses. Grading scheme:
· Startup discovery presentation after 5 weeks: 30%
· Startup validation presentation after 10 weeks: 30%
· Final startup pitches after 13 weeks: 40%

• Blank, S. & Dorf, B. (2012). The startup owner's manual.
• Gans, J. & Stern, S. (2016). Entrepreneurial Strategy.
• Osterwalder, A. & Yves, P. (2010). Business model generation.
• Maurya, A. (2012). Running lean: Iterate from plan A to a plan that works.
• Maurya, A. (2016). Scaling lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth.
• Wilcox, J. (2016). FOCUS Framework: How to Find Product-Market Fit.