Course 2014-2015 a.y.

Course Objectives

We aim at creating marketable Internet ideas. We aim at fostering entrepreneurship and Internet aware managers. We have built our course around a business plan required from attending students. This business plan should include your novel ideas along with a professionally crafted financial forecast.

Then, we present our ideas to the real world business community, composed of angels and institutional investors. Don't be fooled by a naive reading of the course name. We don't just discuss Facebook and its siblings. We analyse the whole Social-Web phenomenon in its entirety and we derive the most important functioning rules. Then we create new and powerful Internet business related projects, in a safe test-bed. Better to be mistaken now than in your next real world project. We aim at avoiding the mighty failures of the two previous Internet bubbles.

We don't want to create products that just appeal to a wide public, we want to have a sound business model as well. This course is designed to develop a student’s ability to find, evaluate, and develop raw technical ideas into commercially viable product concepts, and build those concepts into business propositions. The course focuses on theories and techniques for evaluating Internet technologies commercial capabilities, for fundraising, for designing customer-compatible applications, for understanding the crucial role of the organizational support.

While the course is focused towards venture-funded Internet startups, the pedagogy is sufficiently general so that the knowledge and skills are also directly applicable to Internet adoption within a corporate environment. From the first Internet wave, we have seen enthusiastic people throwing themselves into the entrepreneurial web arena. However, a number of diverse factors caused few to succeed and many to fail.

It is not just a matter of ideas, technological capabilities, or viral diffusion; sustainable business models are required to avoid the growth and the burst of a new Internet bubble. We try to foster conscious entrepreneurship, to take advantage of the endless possibilities of the web and to avoid traps and common mistakes.

Course Content Summary

• Internet related technologies and their business models.
• Selling your idea to Angels. Where is the money?
• Designing your interface and selling your idea to customers.
• Organizing your Internet business and your team.

Detailed Description of Assessment Methods

For Non attending students:
Written exam

For Attending students:
A set of assignments to be developed by the students

Textbooks

For Non Attending Students

100% evaluation on written exam on the following materials:

• M. Fraser, S. Dutta, Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World, John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
• The entire set of papers in the course programme. Titles of papers have to be requested to the professor.

• 70% business plan;
• 15% evaluation of the June presentation
• 15% peer evaluation of the business plan-related individual efforts (N.B, if the peer evaluation grade is below 10/30, the course director can lower the student’s final grade by up to 3 additional points, after having consulted all the group members)