New Venture Creation 5 credits

Every entrepreneurial journey involves dozens of critical decisions, many made under uncertainty with limited time. Each decision creates cascading effects throughout your venture. Make the wrong call on legal structure, and you face tax complications for years. Misjudge financing needs, and you run out of runway at the worst possible moment. Understanding the mechanics behind these choices is important to avoid stumbling. Across five interconnected areas, you will develop the judgment needed to make foundational venture decisions. Technology & IP Strategy covers how to evaluate and protect the novel elements of a venture, including intellectual property considerations and protection strategies. Market mechanics addresses how ventures create and capture value through pricing, unit economics, and competitive positioning. Team & organisation explores how to structure a founding team and align goals across the organisation. Financial planning prepares you to manage a venture's capital needs, from early-stage cash flow to funding strategy. Legal & strategic foundations examines the implications of key structural choices around ownership, market entry, and long-term adaptability. This course prepares you to navigate the key decision areas every new venture faces. When facing choices relating to IP, market positioning, team structure, finances, or legal foundations, you will be equipped to recognise the key variables at play and their long-term implications. The goal is not perfect foresight but competent judgment—knowing what matters, when it matters, and where to focus your limited time and resources. **Connection to Research ** While primarily practice-oriented, the course is grounded in entrepreneurship and innovation research, particularly within JIBS’ focus areas of entrepreneurship and ownership. The frameworks and decision tools you work with reflect current scholarly understandings of venture creation, and you are expected to critically evaluate these, rather than apply them mechanically. **Connection to Practice ** New venture creation is inherently practical, and this course is designed to reflect that. You will apply frameworks and decision tools to your own venture ideas, developing judgment through hands-on engagement with the kinds of choices real founders face. **Connection to Ethics, Responsibility, Sustainability (ERS) ** Founding a venture involves navigating situations where interests conflict, stakes are high, and right answers are rarely obvious. Through teamwork and collaborative decision-making, you will practice handling the interpersonal and ethical dimensions of venture creation—such as equity distribution, role clarity, and accountability. Learning to work through disagreements to make principled decisions under uncertainty is treated as a core entrepreneurial competency in this course.