Course Offerings

For Spring and Summer Semesters 2023, Innov8x Studio will be offered as an intensive Innov8X extension for the continuation of projects, and a summer residency program for teams to develop innovative solutions to problems they have identified in a market or in their own organization. Launch your startup or innovation initiative and gain traction. Click here for more information. Prerequisite: Any introductory entrepreneurship course. 3 lab hours.

This course will be offered in the spring 2023 semester and will combines all flavors of Innovate Defense, Innovate EMx and others. Gain real work experience in this course by joining Mines in helping several Industry members, non-profits, and United States Departments of Homeland Security, including FEMA and TSA to create and deliver excellent sustainable solutions for large, messy, real world problems. Prerequisite: None. 3 semester hours.

Now a part of all Innov8X semester courses. Gain real work experience in this course by joining Mines in helping our Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security to create and deliver excellent sustainable solutions in response to national disasters. Prerequisite: None. 3 semester hours.

Introduces concepts related to starting and expanding a technological-based corporation. Presents ideas such as developing a business and financing plan, role of intellectual property, and the importance of a good R&D program. Prerequisite: None. 3 semester hours.

Entrepreneurial activity has been a potent source of innovation and job generation in the global economy. In the U.S., the majority of new jobs are generated by new entrepreneurial firms. The financial issues confronting entrepreneurial firms are drastically different from those of established companies. The focus in this course will be on analyzing the unique financial issues which face entrepreneurial firms and to develop a set of skills that has wide applications for such situations. Prerequisite: EBGN505. Corequisite: EBGN545. 3 semester hours.

(I) Effective leaders contribute significantly to their organization?s performance. When they take advantage of a technological innovation or respond to a crisis, leaders rely on critical skills to communicate their vision and coordinate tasks performed by others. This course is about developing your unique leadership skills and style whether you lead a small engineering team or, eventually, a large global corporation. We review key theories of leadership and examine the lessons learned from those who applied them. We synthesize and translate these lessons into specific behaviors that enhance your ability to lead. We discuss how generational shifts, economic and political factors impact the workplace in ways that call for effective, quality leadership. Ultimately, you have to understand how to lead and motivate individuals who don’t look or think like you. This may involve motivating followers and involving them in making decisions. Following a learning-by-doing approach, we complement class discussions and case studies with a hands-on simulation of a leadership team facing a series of crises. 3 hours lecture; 3 semester hours.

In a crisis, national security initiatives move fast at startup speed. Yet in peacetime they default to decades-long acquisition and procurement cycles. Obviously, this isn’t cutting it. Today, our potential adversaries are able to quickly acquire and harness the power of innovations: social networks, encryption, GPS, low-cost drones, 3D printers, the Internet and many other technologies. This is your opportunity to do something about it. Learn how to design and test solutions to important national security problems with speed, urgency and creativity.

This course provides a scientific approach to developing and marketing new products which are often critical to the success of firms competing in technology based industries. We will start with an overview of core marketing and then develop prototypes of a new product design. We will step through the new product development process in detail, learning about available tools and techniques to execute each process step along the way. New product prototypes will be used to gather data from prospective target markets and assess the viability of the design in the marketplace. 3 hours lecture; 3 semester hours.. Prerequisites: EBGN360, 3 hours lecture; 3 semester hours.

This is a series of short courses and lab that introduce students to the entrepreneurial process as follows:

• EBGN498 Beneficiary Discovery.
• EBGN498 Creative Problem Solving.
• EBGN498 Business Model Development.
• EBGN498/598 Business Model Lab.

The beneficiary discovery process focuses on investigating an interesting problem that a startup can try to solve. Correctly identifying and framing a problem is a critical step towards solving it. We take the time to deeply learn how a problem affects people using a process of empathy mapping. This step involves interviewing people and “falling in love with their problem.” We do not explore solutions nor do we brainstorm ways to deal with problems. The objective is to get the right problem and get the problem right before we attempt to solve it.

The creative problem solving involves developing potential solutions to a problem using rapid pretotyping (or pre-prototyping). A pretotype is a simple and quick test to validate an assumption about the potential solution. Iterating on pretotypes results in a minimal viable prototype or product (MVP). The objective is to arrive at a solution that actually solves the problem.

The business model development process is where you evaluate turning your solution to a problem into a viable and sustainable business. We use the business model canvas approach to explore different revenue and cost models and iterate on them. The objective is to develop a business model that allows the new venture to deliver value and scale.

As with all our entrepreneurship courses, the only effective way to acquire an entrepreneurial mindset is to practice it. This course takes an experiential approach: You are expected to start a new venture and be an active participant in the learning process. You interact with the beneficiaries and partners as you initiate and validate your ideas and hypotheses. Your active participation and engaged presence is required. Problems and solutions are broadly considered in commercial, social/non-profit or government contexts. Prerequisite: Intense curiosity. 1 hours lecture; .05 semester hours.

Students must engage in the design process to satisfy the needs of their clients.