DIGITAL PRODUCT INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEU

The exponential growth of information and data—combined with software that can understand and learn from experience—provides entrepreneurs with tremendous opportunities to bring innovative customer-focused solutions to market. While there are no direct paths to bring a new product idea to market, there are easily identifiable milestones that can guide the way from idea generation to product profitability. This course will explore the process of early-stage development of knowledge-driven, data-intensive digital products like Spotify, Netflix, Watson, and TripAdvisor. The goal is to create a hands-on entrepreneurial experience at its most elemental and visceral level—ideation, brainstorming, interacting with customers, building a founding team, developing a business model, managing risk, investigating competitors, pitching the business to potential investors, and creating an interactive mobile app prototype (a design proof of concept for your business idea) through an iterative user-centered design process.

In this course, we use Eric Reis’ startup method from his book, Lean Startup, as a foundation for creating and testing new ideas. Students learn to validate their new product ideas in the market by immediately engaging with customers to gauge whether their idea solves a problem better than alternative solutions. Building on the insight generated by customer interviews, students design a business model using the Lean Canvas approach designed by Ash Maurya and iterate their ideas based on Design Thinking (Tim Brown) principles. Throughout the course, we will shift from learning to the rapid application of new frameworks to speed up product design and development.

Students will be exposed to all the pressures and demands of real-world start-ups by participating in teams tasked with creating weekly deliverables required to launch a new business. The user-experience skills and methods that are taught in this class are in demand by employers and startups across nearly every industry and reflect the latest best practices used to create today’s most widely used and award-winning digital products. The skills developed in this class apply to many real-world business problems that require an agile and iterative approach.