Plenary lectures will introduce participants to a wide range of key issues and common themes in innovation and entrepreneurship. All students attend these lectures.
Idea innovation
This session encourages participants to operate outside their normal frames of thinking to develop new, innovative and exciting ideas to solve current and common problems.
Business Model Canvas
This session introduces the Business Model Canvas - a strategic management and lean start-up template for developing new, or documenting existing, business models. This visual chart describes infrastructure, value proposition, customers, and finances.
Value proposition
Value propositions explain how a product or service solves customers’ problems or improves their situation, delivers specific benefits and tells the ideal customer why they should buy from one supplier instead of another. We see how great propositions are created and communicated.
Defining the customer
A customer profile can help to clearly define their needs through their buying patterns and their motivations for buying. This session focuses on segmenting customers, to enable targeted marketing activities to be developed to fit them.
Marketing innovation
This session looks at how marketing has changed from traditional to more innovative digital approaches through the rise of mobile communications and broadband internet. It looks at how brands have harnessed new technologies to develop innovations in the ‘marketing mix’.
Culture and dynamics
This session is orientated around why individuals do what they do - their beliefs, motivations and attitudes - and how an organisation can use those values to drive the development of policies, processes and procedures and consequently generate value and competence.
Finance - basics
Starting and running a business requires a good understanding of the role that finance plays in making the business operate profitably and sustainably. It requires that business owners develop financial intelligence.
Revenue streams
Revenue streams can be generated in many different ways and this session reviews a range of options and how they may be used together. There has been extensive innovation in the development of new models including freemium, subscription, affiliation and advertising among many others.
Simple cash flow
This session covers the creation of a simple cash flow forecast showing which items need to be included, where those data come and what insights and information can be derived from the forecast.
Operations – basics
This session addresses the essentials that drive the day-to-day business. These include where, if it is manufactured, your product is coming from and who is making it, and how your product is being delivered - by whom and to whom. The session also looks at how operational processes can define success in terms of customer service and satisfaction.
Innovation in product design
Some elements of business success can be assigned to the way any product is designed and delivered to the customer. We review basic product design principles and how they can be used to introduce innovations that differentiate a product from its competition.
Prototyping and MVP
Any idea can often be best represented through the creation of a prototype or the development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). We cover the fundamentals of creating prototypes and MVPs effectively, to test out a proposition’s strength and viability.
Innovation in service provision
The definition and delivery of services, (not products), demands a different set of business skills and techniques. We focus on the design and delivery of service innovation that can deliver high quality experiences and customer satisfaction.
Team basics
Team building is both an art and a science and the ability to and manage build high performing teams is a core business competence. This session looks at effective team-building and at what combinations of character types work well together to develop, implement and support customer solutions.
What investors want to see
For any potential investor, the management team will be a major area of risk. This session covers the primary level of consensus, diversity of experience, customer and market knowledge and overall adaptability.
Route to market
A route to market is how a company sells its product and how it plans its sales. This session introduces a range of different routes to market which will include direct selling, selling wholesale, distance selling, online selling and developing a combination of channels.
Legals, IP and responsibility
This session covers the basics of how taking on running a business means taking on a range of responsibilities to yourself, your employees, your customers and the government - in terms of obeying the law, paying your taxes and being compliant with regulations. It also covers the basis of commercial value management and the role of IP in commercial entities.
Shares and shareholders
Anyone who owns shares in a limited company is called a 'shareholder' or 'member'. They normally receive a percentage of trading profits that correlates with their percentage of ownership. We cover the principles of creating, allocating and managing shares, and the roles and responsibilities of shareholders.
Valuation and investors
Many entrepreneurs start a business in order to sell it and so for them, and for many others, working out how much their business is worth at different stages of its development is a recurring question. Valuation is a complex process, and is very different dependent on whether you are buying or selling. This session looks at common ways in which companies are valued. It covers some of the issues and traps that companies fall into when trying to establish a true value.
Invited speakers for 2020 included:
- Professor Eden Yin - University Senior Lecturer in Marketing
- Paul Bourne - Fellow in Creative Engagement
- Simon Stockley - Senior Teaching Faculty in Entrepreneurship at Cambridge Judge Business School
- Simon Hall - News Correspondent, BBC news
- Kiran Kapur - CEO Cambridge Marketing College
- Colin Haden - Senior Industrial Fellow at the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing
- Dr Ward Hills - Director, Cambridge Space Technologies
- Eric Wood - Director at Affirma Ltd, Visiting Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School
- John Yeomans - Angel Investor
- Mike Phipps - CEO, Politics at Work
- Benn Lawson - University Senior Lecturer in Operations Management, Cambridge Judge Business School
- Sarah Hewett - Supply Chain and Manufacturing Finance Analyst at Abcam
