EVC Week

This 90-minute workshop will expose participants to several tools that can be useful in evaluating the financial viability of a startup business. The session will provide a brief overview of analytic tools to help address these key questions: How much money will it take to launch my company? Am I likely to be able to raise outside funding, and if so, from what sorts of sources? How big do we need to get to pay ourselves and quit our day jobs? How about to make a profit? Facilitated by Jim Price, Ross Faculty & ZLI Entrepreneur in Residence.

Customer discovery is a critical activity that allows you to develop and test hypotheses about your new business or social venture. This 90-minute workshop will provide participants with the knowledge, skills and tools to conduct effective customer discovery. You'll learn how to: identify and approach the 'right' people and secure their participation; conduct effective interviews that extract useful information; capture/document your findings; and extract and synthesize the key insights. Facilitated by Josh Botkin, Ross Faculty & ZLI Entrepreneur in Residence.

This 90-minute workshop will help entrepreneurs understand how to evaluate the market for their product or service. Is it big and exciting enough for you to pursue? For investors to get excited about? We'll look at proven approaches to conducting secondary and primary research, in order to glean answers to key questions such as: How big is my market? Is it ready for my solution? How can I break up my market into useful customer segments, and then which segment should I target first, and why? Who are my competitors, and how do I position myself to compete successfully against them? Facilitated by Jim Price, Ross Faculty & ZLI Entrepreneur in Residence.

This 90-minute workshop will explore what a business model is; why a strong model is absolutely critical to anyone interested in launching a new product, service, business, or social venture; and how to develop an effective business model. Participants will learn how to use Alex Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas, a valuable one-page tool for generating and assessing business models. Facilitated by Josh Botkin, Ross Faculty & ZLI Entrepreneur in Residence.