StartUp Management 1st semester's overview (part I)
The very first semester for technology entrepreneurship bachelor program StartUp Management has passed. In this bachelor program students spend 90% + of their time from learning by doing via projects and workshops and large portion of the business studies are all about emotional intelligence, competencies and technologies. We can say honestly – there are a lot things that have been done! Doesn’t seems like it has passed just 4 months because it feels like 1.5 years.
We wanted to make this small overview about the first semester to share the experience with others. Hopefully at least some of it will be useful for you as well and you might change your daily routine and behavior for the good.
We hope that our new StartUp Management program will work as an example and motivation for other educational institutions to change as we believe that education has to change. It can’t stay the same as it has been for the last hundreds of years. Technology is pushing the World to develop so fast that people have to learn new skills to stay competitive in the ever changing environment.
Let’s start with the StartUp Management course list we had in the 1st semester:
- Development as an Expert
- Information Technologies for Entrepreneurs
- Technology Entrepreneurship
- Business Management
- 21st Century Marketing
- Finance Markets
- Innovation Week
Here are just the largest projects that students have executed during the 1st semester:
- Each student has created their individual daily schedule (Time planning),
- Each student has created their LinkedIn profile and started to build their professional network,
- At least 5 Coursera.org courses have been finished and digital certification earned,
- Time management, Task Management, Project management, Communication, Collaboration, Analytic, Automation tools has been found and implemented in student's daily processes and communication. (Slack, Google Drive, HubSpot, Asana, Zapier),
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Students took a part in hackathons:
- Windhackers Hackathon (IV place)
- Green Idea Hackathon (1st place and 2000 EUR) - We have been working on and attracted some awesome sponsors and supporters like Accenture, Bite Latvia, Printify, Teknos, Infogr.am, Magnetic Latvia Ventspils Business Incubator, Uzavas beer 🙂
- Students took a part in the largest conference in the Baltics for youngsters “Uzdrīksties Uzvarēt 2019”. They where responsible for figuring out the concept of the booth, creating the design, getting rollups, brochures etc. and actually going there and hustling to promote the "Start-Up Management" program. Basically they did everything to participate in the conference themselves,
- Students took a part in one of the TOP Tech conferences in Latvia Digital Freedom Festival as volunteers,
- Students where and still are involved in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) strategy development and execution focus group for Ventspils municipality,
- Students have been working on branding for the student's agency "Basaful", mobility center “MobilCentrs” and the new FDI initiative.
- All of the students have created and already are using E-Signature as that's a must thing to be fast and efficient enough in nowadays business environment.
- Students are taking part in “KINGS” student incubator and working on 3 business idea market research,
- Students have taken part in planning and recording the webinar for “Start-Up Management”,
- Students are initiators of startup community initiative and are organising “Emotional Intelligence & Tech” MeetUps
- One of the students has taken part in national level of representing all the students in Latvia by taking part in (Latvijas Studentu Apvienība),
- Students are taking part (and actually are responsible for at least 70% of) bachelor program's "Start-Up Management" marketing plan planning and execution,
- Students have worked with configuration of HubSpot CRM system for automation of processes with communication with potential students for the next year,
- Students have started to work on 2-days 'open doors' event “Business Academdy Bootcamp 2020” for the "Start-Up Management" bachelor program which will happen in 6th and 7th of June,
- Gym's initiative in Ventspils University of Applied Sciences,
- And much much more.
To mention that all of this has been done just with 7 students. We can’t even image what we will be able to achieve next year when another 25 ambitious and like-minded students will join! 🙂
When we started to put together the list of the projects we have done we understood that it will take more than just one article to describe all of this. So this is just the part I of the Autumn 2019 overview.
In part I we will try to write about the very beginning of the semester. Probably September only.
So getting back to the bachelor program itself. All the courses are put together in a logical order so that students can get the most out of the studies.
So we did start with “Personal Development” course where one of the task was finding out each student’s strenghts and weakenesess. This helps to understand which are student’s strenghts when building a team – which role might be the most appropriate and weakensess as we are working on improving the weak spots.
Probably, one of the most important topics there was is “Learning to Learn” where students found out many useful tips to make their studies much more efficient. This is something that we have to work on continuously as it’s not just a technique but a mindset which requires practising.
Another very useful task (from student’s feedback) was to work on increasing productivity and understanding the daily schedule to be able to get max out of the day. This helped students to ‘open their eyes’ that there is a plenty of time and you can do a lot of things in 24h IF YOU PLAN. Planning not only helps to be more efficient but helps to stay on the track and see if your performance is getting lower.
The main requirements when working on daily schedule were finding time for:
Online courses, reading books and writing essays, sleeping (6.5h+), workouts, private projects, common projects, socializing, relax, and some spare time (1-2h a day) to be filled upon needs as there always are some surprises that couldn’t have been planned.
This is the results we have got:
In the same Personal development course students had to create their LinkedIn profile and start working on building their professional network. This task will be on a regular basis for all 4 years as students will gain more and more practical experience, they will be more aware of what they are good at and what they like, they will use these profiles for their projects to connect to partners and customers, apply for an interview etc.
Another good benefit worth mentioning is that during the “StartUp Management” bachelor program students gain free access to Coursera paid version and that means they are able to get all the courses they want and on completition get digital certificate that can be added to their online CV on LinkedIn. It has been just 4 months and it already looks something like that:
All the students should have at least 5 certificates so far. By the end of the studies they might have around 40 high quality course’s certificates (and never the less – the knowledge) on their CV’s – nice! Personal branding and online presence is very important in nowadays especially if you are about to enter the tech market where people do search your name before they meet you and if you can’t be found on Google it might seem very suspicious 🙂 So you better be there and look good! 🙂
They can use Coursera to gain knowledge and certificates in unlimited amount on top of the minimum required from the program. Looking forward what are the limits and who will gather the most!
All the students should have at least 5 certificates so far. By the end of the studies they might have around 40 high quality course’s certificates (and never the less – the knowledge) on their CV’s – nice! Personal branding and online presence is very important in nowadays especially if you are about to enter the tech market where people do search your name before they meet you and if you can’t be found on Google it might seem very suspicious 🙂 So you better be there and look good! 🙂
Fun fact: average connection amount of Startup Management student after the 1st semester is 88 connections. (From 53 up to 153)
During the course “IT for Entrepreneurs” students had a change to get to know with some of the basic must have tools for daily work in teams and companies. They where involved to participate in developing the new program’s internal processes, information flow and structure planning and implementation. To make it work they had to find the appropriate tools for these tasks and configure them. Tools that has been implemented are:
u.c.
Students came up with the responsibilities of 3 groups: administrative, marketing and student agency team (regarding the agency in more detail a bit later)
After implementation of task management tool Asana and doing some additional research they found another tool called ClickUp, which turns out to be very good and looks like more appropriate then Asana for our use case. Students had a chance to try out this new found tool on a real team which applied and agreed to be the test-bed for our workshop. So students did an interview to find out existing daily tasks and processes to be aware of what could be automated and the structure for tasks to configure. After the interview it took 1 week to come up with the final version of configured task management solution. Students went to pitch the solution to the customer and the team of 3 who took over this solution for their daily routine are very satisfied and excited! Student’s provided solution has made their daily tasks much more easy to monitor, follow-up, share between 3 of them, have a reminders and made the collaboration much faster and more transparent.
This is how our daily tasks dashboard looks like:
Students of StartUp Management program had to get to know with some Agile principles to be able to implement these task management tools more efficiently.
So this was a very small preview of what are we doing and what have we done so far. As more we work together the faster we become and we are increasing the capability and capacity of the student’s team. This allows us to set even higher targets and target more ambitious goals. One of the main rules in StartUp Managament environment is SHARING. We do share the knowledge between ourselves on daily basis and we want to extend this to external environment as well. So we are working on figuring out what is the best structure and format of sharing our journey, fails and lessons learned to others.
We want to provide added value to high school pupils, potential students, existing students, teachers and others who are interested in education, startups, business, technology and emotional intelligence.
Please let us know if you liked this post or there is something we should improve the next time or you might have some questions. In the next article we will continue article about the first semester so stay tuned!
BTW – we want to invite anyone who is considering entrepreneurship, marketing, startup studies to attend our 2-days event Business Academy Bootcamp 2020 which will take place on 6.06 & 7.06, 2020. It’s an awesome opportunity to get to know “StartUp Management” environment, mentors, try out the study format, gain useful knowledge, get to know other like-mined people and just have a good weekend in seaside city Ventspils!
It’s free & it’s awesome! Apply below: