DES 420 EXD: Entrepreneurship
EXD (interdisciplinary entrepreneurship) provides a year-long immersion in the practice of entrepreneurship. Throughout the two-semester, interdisciplinary course, student teams engage in research, problem finding, idea generation, design, marketing, operations, and finance. In the first semester of the course, students aim to develop a cache of opportunity areas, form teams around mutual interest areas, and develop business concepts through rapid iteration cycles. Before the end of the semester, teams will make idea selections and engage in product prototyping, target market definition, formation of value propositions, sourcing of manufacturing (or implementation) partners, and creating business model presentations that document the testing of assumptions and outline steps for further development. The pedagogy of the interdisciplinary student team in this course focuses on cross-training rather than discipline specialization; lectures on design, engineering, and business principles are delivered to students across all disciplines with the expectation that all students engage with concepts and to varying degrees of execution of activities across fields.
While the course involves traditional lectures, discussions, and in-class presentations, student teams are required to develop relationships with stakeholders outside of the school environment to conduct primary research, as dictated by project topics, and to collaborate with partners where outside resources are necessary to realize ideas and/or validate hypotheses.