Strategy for Startups: From Idea to Impact

Why attend Strategy for Startups?

There are many possible paths to success for good ideas. How can innovators and entrepreneurs weigh their options and confidently make choices to position their ventures for competitive advantage? This two-day entrepreneurship course provides a practical and systematic approach to exploring and evaluating the core choices that entrepreneurs need to make as they translate their ideas into reality.

To achieve competitive advantage, innovation-driven and growth-oriented entrepreneurs must balance experimentation and learning with the selection and implementation of a strategy. Designed for the leaders of innovation-driven and growth-oriented startups, this entrepreneurship course builds on an emerging body of work at MIT and elsewhere that moves beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to startups and instead focuses on the key choices that founders face as they start and scale their business.

As a participant in this course, you will learn how to make the right choices for your venture by exploring multiple market opportunities and strategies and then identifying a

single

strategy to pursue using a unique, MIT-developed framework. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to identify the paths for your venture that you should

not

take. You will also leave with a better understanding of the skills and behaviors required to scale your ventures over time.

You will complete this entrepreneurship course with a better understanding of:

The role of strategy in a new enterprise and the key strategic choices facing startups

How to take advantage of a novel opportunity through learning and experimentation

How to separate the underlying “idea” from strategic alternatives

The decisions that can help your venture establish competitive advantage

Ways in which founders can structure learning and experimentation, and their early venture, to help them realize their overall startup strategy

How to align the different elements of an overall entrepreneurial strategy, including how to integrate organizational choices with the process of choosing and executing a go-to-market strategy

The process of how to choose and execute a startup strategy

An integrated framework applying the entrepreneurial strategy process in a systematic way

Course Topics

Ideal for anyone pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors, this course is presented through a combination of interactive lectures, case analyses, and exercises. You will leave with:

A deep understanding of the core strategic choices facing startup innovators

A synthetic framework for the development and implementation of startup strategy in dynamic environments

Key insights into skills and behaviors required to scale those ventures over time

A methodology for evaluating the factors that are most important for successfully scaling an entrepreneurial venture