Entrepreneurship – Winter 2023 – Course Code 25740
Class Meeting Hours: Wednesdays 6:00-9:50 PM (Once a week for 2:50) Instructor: David Ochi (dochi@uci.edu)
Introduction: You are a technologist. You are familiar with all modern tools and have a strong belief about what innovative products can be developed to help humanity. Your algorithms are the best that you have seen anywhere. You also have this great idea for a product that will make a change in society. You want to convert this idea to a real product and build a company to change the world and your fortune.
What you will learn…
What you will learn
This course will introduce you to the basic tools and techniques required to be an entrepreneur in today’s data/information society. Many steps are required to convert your technology and technical ideas into a product and then build a company to realize your dream. We will discuss this process and the important steps in it. Techniques required for defining your product, protecting your intellectual capital, preparing a business plan, raising funds to build the company, building a technical and business team, and running a successful business will form the content of the course.
Learn…
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How to define and develop a product?
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How to build a team to build the product and launch a company?
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How to launch your product?
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How to minimize risks and maximize the probability of success in making it happen?
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How to protect your ideas and intellectual property?
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How to get resources for building the product and a company around it?
This course will have regular lectures, guest lectures, and projects. Discussions and experiments using social media are an important part of learning and being an entrepreneur. Your active participation in discussions will be very important for learning and building skills required to define and develop products and then build a company around them. In most cases, after an idea is presented in class, a specific group may be asked to explain how that will be used in their project’s context. All this will be part of your contributions to the class and also will be used for evaluation of your learning and grade.
In many respects, this is a different course from most courses in ICS. It is not about technology but about building successful technology products and companies. We will have lots of discussions in and outside class and you will work in close teams. Your goal will be to understand how to build technology products that solve real problems. Most discussions will be to understand the process of defining and designing those products and building a company to bring these products to market.
Course Organization: The course will meet once a week. This Winter course is the second in a series of two courses. You are not required to participate in both quarters but to fully get the value of the class, it is helpful to be in both quarters. You will continue your work from the first quarter (Fall) to the second quarter (Winter). The first quarter was mostly about defining the product and market opportunity and in the Winter quarter, we will be about building a company around it.
Most classes will be lectures/discussions on specific topics. We will provide a tentative lecture schedule at the start of the term. Use this schedule as a guide. The schedule of guest lecturers is subject to change. The dates for projects are firm. No extensions will be allowed.
A schedule of classes may be posted at the beginning of the second full week of classes.
Class slides will be made available to you after class each week. A video of the class discussion may also be made available.