363-1095-00L  Deep Science Entrepreneurship

SemesterAutumn Semester 2018
LecturersB. Clarysse
Periodicityyearly recurring course
CourseDoes not take place this semester.
Language of instructionEnglish


AbstractThe deep science entrepreneurship course is geared toward postgraduate students who are interested in understanding and mastering key activities that help turn deep-science inventions into value-creating innovations. The course has a strong practical focus and aims to prepare its participants for founding science and technology-based ventures.
Learning objectiveIn this course, we help students with a strong science or engineering background understand and master some of the key challenges of turning science into products and ultimately operating businesses. In so doing, we adopt a strongly entrepreneurial lens. That means, we will look at commercialization activities through the eyes of a potential science-based entrepreneur.

Throughout the course we aim to work on real inventions from ETHZ labs and help push them further toward value creation.

The knowledge students will acquire will help them prepare for their own entrepreneurial journey. It will also be extremely valuable should they choose a career in managing technology in an established firm or within a public or private research lab.
ContentThe course will bring together postgraduate-level students from different disciplines, with a strong interest in entrepreneurial activity. In small teams students will work on a real ETHZ technology to help build a case and roadmap for its commercialization.

Key topics we will cover in this course:
1) Theoretical insights into the origin of entrepreneurial opportunities from scientific inventions: Search Theory (local and distant search), problem spaces and problem-solution sets
2) Entrepreneurial Thinking: understanding competitive advantage, strategic positioning and options thinking
3) Opportunity Roadmaps: Developing and evaluating market application portfolios under conditions of high uncertainty
4) Business Case Development: Crafting compelling strategies for opportunity exploitation and gathering resources
5) Real-life cases of ETH inventions with commercialization potential
Lecture notesslides, handouts, and case presentations
Literatureon demand
Prerequisites / NoticeIf you have an interesting science-based project you think could benefit from going through this bootcamp to evaluate and generate a commercialization roadmap, please email jthiel@ethz.ch

If you are interested in participating in this course, please note that this is a time- and effort-intensive bootcamp, which requires high levels of commitment from its participants. If this is exciting for you, please send a CV and letter of motivation to jthiel@ethz.ch.