Just ahead of the September 15th online panel discussion “Empathy, Creativity, and Innovation,” we’ve reposted a story on value creation and lean methodology as described by entrepreneurship Professor Furkan Gur. The story first appeared in 2020 in the college’s annual magazine NIU Business. Gur is one of three entrepreneurship faculty members who will share their expertise on innovation during the September 15th online panel discussion, which is produced through the college’s Wednesday Night Wisdom initiative. To register for the event, visit: go.niu.edu/wnw .
What does failing fast look like? How would you draw it?
Furkan Gur, assistant professor in the Department of Management, compels his students to embrace the idea of a new venture in just this way: on a blank slate. He teaches two courses in the entrepreneurship area of study. One is Business Model Design and the other is Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. In both classes, he leads his students on a different path toward venture creation. They travel light, without a traditional business plan.
“All business ideas are basically best guesses about the value they offer. Business plans can be incredibly useful,” Gur acknowledges before adding a caveat. “But there’s a great deal of internalization that occurs in order to write one. Usually by the time the plan is fully articulated, the environment has changed, often drastically, taking with it the need for the idea in the first place.”
Everything about Gur is quick, including the first-day walk-through of his syllabus for the Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship course. Contrast this with his Business Model Design course where the syllabus takes a back seat to a class activity.
In both classes, Gur’s students represent a range of NIU colleges and disciplines: business, engineering, political science, computer science, art, music. But no matter their major, on the first day they face an immediate challenge: to form a team and identify a new venture, then begin to articulate the underlying assumptions about its value-add and prepare to take action by adhering to an extensive process of discovery. If that weren’t enough, they have until the end of class to envision the opportunity and its merits before they spend the rest of the semester refining their ideas. Business Model Design students operate on an even shorter timeline. On the very first day after identifying their business idea, they also create a direct sales website complete with a promotional video clip. Beyond that, Business Model Design students have just one month to launch and run the enterprise. This entails developing the business idea; developing a brand; establishing the supply chain; building a comprehensive website; producing, packaging and designing a graphic brand; marketing, distributing and selling their product; then ensuring after-sales services and financial accounting. Additional resources students tap into include tools to develop video clips for upload to the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform.
It’s an intense beginning that out of necessity moves forward with ongoing marketplace scrutiny. (Read the full article in the online version of the 2020 NIU Business magazine here, where the story continues on page 7.)
~ written and posted by M. De Jean, Director of Marketing, NIU College of Business
