Hi, and welcome to our course preview for developing the opportunity for corporate entrepreneurs. My name is James Green, and I'm the Director of Entrepreneurship Education for Mtech, which is Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute within the University of Maryland. I've been with the university since 2004, and am responsible for a number of entrepreneurship programs, both in the startup and in the corporate realm. And I'll talk a little bit about that later. And I've been working with Coursera since 2013. So this is my second course with Coursera. And it's been an exciting opportunity to share best practices that we have here on campus with a global context of students that we're excited to work with. So corporate entrepreneurship, it's something that we know it when we see it, although it can be a bit hard to define. So, when we think about, what are the big companies out there that do entrepreneurship innovation well? Well, Google and Facebook come to mind. Yahoo, pending the year, comes to mind. Shutterstock, Gore or even Lockheed Martin as far back as the 1940s come to mind. But what we are going to talk about with our course are, what are some of the practices? What are some of the philosophies? What are some of the models that are assistive to having entrepreneurial outcomes within a corporate setting where you are not simply copying what other organizations are doing? While there are best practices to be learned, we want to recognize, what's going to work for you? What's going to work for your corporation? What's going to work for your organization? And what's going to work for your employees? I also come at this from a perspective of doing it myself. So, as I mentioned, I started with the university in 2004, and at that time, none of these programs existed. So, what we've done within our university and within my team, has been entrepreneurs in and of ourselves. And so, what we've done and what we've brought to bear are new opportunities for students in the high school market by having summer programs. And with freshman and sophomore market by having new residential entrepreneurship, living, learning and incubator programs. Of new seed funding programs, of a new minor in technology entrepreneurship for undergrads. Of a new masters program for global technology entrepreneurs. It's a 100% online masters program. And then MOOCs, bringing a number of MOOCs to market our of our department. So when we talk about corporate entrepreneurship, we're not only talking about for-profit large companies. We're talking about non-profits. We're talking about universities. We're talking about governments. We're talking about NGOs and other large organizations that may be structured differently than a small startup. A big piece of that is, how do you enable employees to be entrepreneurial? Well, our approach and what we've seen in the market that's worked, is you need to cultivate their entrepreneurial mindset, their entrepreneurial motivations, their entrepreneurial behaviors. You need to enable their ability to see new opportunities in industries and markets that you may already be within or that you may want to enter. You need to champion entrepreneurial action. So thinking entrepreneurially is a nice thing and seeing entrepreneurially is a good thing to do. But if you're not going to act on it, it's all for naught. We also want to talk about how you provide encouragement and support within the company, within its senior leadership. And within structures that are going to facilitate entrepreneurial action. And we'll also talk about the element of providing some measure of reassurance, where there's not a fear for innovation or a fear of failure. So, what will you learn within the course? Well, you'll certainly learn how to identify new opportunities. And these are skills that you can practice yourself or that you can teach others to do within your organization. You're going to learn how to do and measure entrepreneurial thinking. You're going to learn measure of entrepreneurial seeing. And you're going to learn a measure of entrepreneurial action. So it's kind of these four legs that our course is built upon. That is the first step towards corporate entrepreneurship. The model that we'll use for the course is the Opportunity Analysis Canvas. So this is something that I've developed over the last 12 years to help startups and to help corporate entrepreneurs identify new opportunities. Of how to really identify an entrepreneurial mindset and develop an entrepreneurial mindset within themselves. And then march that through a series of considerations and questions and tools and techniques to begin to validate some of those opportunities. We are the first course within the corporate entrepreneurship specialization. So we have an all-star team of faculty that are working within our program. And these same faculty teach within our masters program and within our minor programs on campus. So, my course focuses on developing the opportunity. And then subsequent courses focuses on business modeling and strategy, finance as well. So, collectively, what we're doing in our course is, helping you identify this first step, build some expertise within that, and give you a good grounding, that might add value to you. Within your organization, within your company, to be a better innovator, to be a better entrepreneur, and to help others to do that as well.
