- Teacher: Jonathan Schad
The challenge of Business Game is to act as an entrepreneurial team. Businesses are increasingly asked to contribute to fighting societal challenges and struggle to find answers beyond philanthropy. Entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship offer promising ways to identify innovative ideas that benefit business and society alike. While entrepreneurs aim at creating a new venture, intrapreneurs perform entrepreneurial activities within existing firms.
Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs need to be able to provide persuasive project proposals. Therefore, they need to conduct appropriate research and analyses to come up with a coherent project. Subsequently, they have to conduct a professional presentation on their project to persuade top-management or investors.
The aim of Business Game is to simulate the work of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs seeking to address societal challenges. Being successful requires the broad application of conceptual lenses and methods (from other Bachelor courses). We will focus on entrepreneurial thinking to respond to societal challenges and how they can be implemented (through a new venture or within an existing organization). We will do so in a structured way to identify ideas that create value for a business and society alike. Students have to come up with a compelling proposal and present it.
The course provides participants a hands-on approach to learn about entrepreneurial thinking. We discuss societal issues and ways to apply entrepreneurial thinking to them during lectures. Students will then learn about tools exercises to come up with their own ideas. Since group work is a key component of this course, there will be multiple instances to receive feedback on ideas. This course asks students to actively reflect how to respond to real-world issues using the tools from their studies.
This course provides a pragmatic way to deal with questions of sustainability and corporate responsibility by discussing ways of how pressing societal challenges can be addressed using entrepreneurial thinking.