MIT Entrepreneurial OpenCourseWare

MIT Enterprise Forum OpenCourseWareis a free educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT’s mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. A list of courses available includes:

“Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans
Taught during the Independent Activity Period every January by Joe Hadzima ’73, the MIT Enterprise Forum, Inc.’s Chairman of the Board, this class is meant for those interested in starting their own businesses.

Law for the Entrepreneur and Manager
A basic understanding of legal issues that corporations face during their existence.

Entrepreneurial Finance
An examination of the elements of entrepreneurial finance, focusing on technology-based start-up ventures, and the early stages of company development.

Marketing Strategy
This course is aimed at helping students identify, evaluate and develop a marketing strategy that best suits the strategy of their company.

Entrepreneurial Marketing
This course clarifies key marketing concepts, methods, and strategic issues relevant for start-up and early-stage entrepreneurs.

Global Entrepreneurship Lab
G-Lab focuses on the issues and challenges facing a global start-up.

Designing and Leading the Entrepreneurial Organization
This subject is about building, running and growing an organization, including establishing a structure and culture that cultivates success.

Managing the Innovation Process
The primary goal of the course is to expose students to a variety of perspectives on innovation through different levels of analysis.”

Business Plan Resources and Examples

The Small Business Development Center National Information Clearinghouse offers a goodcollection of resource links and sample business plans including several for restaurants, which is what many people think about opening when they first consider becoming entrepreneurs.

Famous Trials Website

“My vision was to create the Web’s largest collection of primary documents, images, essays, and other materials relating to famous trials from Salem to Simpson. Trials have long struck me as wonderful vehicles for exploring history and human nature. What better way to understand the 20s than reading about the Scopes, Sacco-Vanzetti, and Leopold and Loeb trials? What provides better insights into the nature of evil than reading the transcripts of the William Calley court-martial or the Nuremberg trials? Would not the Amistad, Shipp, Scottsboro Boys, Sweet, and “Mississippi Burning” trials provide an excellent launching point for a discussion of racism in America? I wanted these materials to be made readily available, in an easily digestible form, for everyone from junior high students to law professors.”

So states Professor Douglas Linder of the University of Missouri – Kansas City School of Law about his Famous Trials Website. In my view, he has succeeded very well and the site is worth visiting for its fascinating and easily read subject matter — famous trials from Socrates to Bill Clinton

Make a Charitable Microloan via Kiva

“Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world.

By choosing a business on our website and then lending money online to that enterprise, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive monthly email updates that let you know about the progress being made by the small business you’ve sponsored. These updates include reports on loan repayment progress, photos of new capital equipment, narratives on business growth and standard of living improvements, and more. As loans are repaid, you will get your original loan money back.

How does the loan process work?
By partnering with existing microfinance organizations and institutions, Kiva finds outstanding entrepreneurs who need loan funding. Our expert in-country staff works with these partner organizations to conduct due diligence on each business, and once approved, post each business’ profile on our website. This is where you come in. You can choose loan money online, using your credit card or Paypal, in increments as low as $25 toward the loan needs of a business. With your participation, Kiva gives entrepreneurs access to the capital they need to lift themselves out of poverty. ”

Found via this Seth Godin post.

An Executive Summary of the Executive Summary

“The Executive Summary (or Project Summary) is not only a synopsis of the most important parts of the business plan and project, but it is in fact your plan in miniature form. Brevity is the key word in presenting a summary of your business plan….The Executive Summary should be written in a clear, concise, logical manner and should be viewed as a “stand-alone” document. As such, it must accomplish the following if it is to get the reader’s attention:

-Must be easy to read and understand
-Capture and hold the interest and attention of the reader
-Encourage the reader to want to read more of the actual business plan
-Highlight the positive aspects of the business, past, present and future
-Succeed in conveying the substantive nature of the rest of the plan
-Show that you have a competent and experienced management team
-Be market-driven and not product-driven
-Identify sales and distribution channels
-Show that you know and understand your competition
-Addresses future direction and strategies
-Provide historical and current financial information and future projections
-State the amount of funds required, financing structure, and repayment, period of loan, investor exit position”

Read more is this detailed summary from the Cynton Company via Mondaq (free registration required).

Fair Use of Copyrighted Materials

“What is fair use?

We would all appreciate a clear, crisp answer to that one, but far from clear and crisp, fair use is better described as a shadowy territory whose boundaries are disputed, more so now that it includes cyberspace than ever before. In a way, it’s like a no-man’s land. Enter at your own risk.

Why is it like this and does it have to be this way? Is there no alternative to the vagueness of the “four factor fair use analysis,” to fear of lawsuits and frustration with uncertainty? Maybe it is reasonable to simply throw up our hands and say, “What’s the use?” After all, many legal scholars, politicians, copyright owners and users and their lawyers agree that fair use is so hard to understand that it fails to provide effective guidance for the use of others’ works today. But the fact is, we really must understand and rely on it.

So wouldn’t Guidelines help? Many people who think so recently gathered in Washington to negotiate Guidelines for Educational Uses of Digital Works in a two-year-long Conference on Fair Use (“CONFU”). For many, the Guidelines that emerged satisfied the need for clarity; but for some, considerable objections remained. Some CONFU participants and their constituents complained that the Guidelines were too narrow; others that they were too broad; or unfounded in the law; or too premature; or too long; or unclear; and so on. In the minds of many, the Guidelines asked the right questions, but for some, they provided the wrong answers.”

The University of Texas decided to take a different approach to guiding its component institutions and faculty, staff and students in the exercise of fair use rights. They call their approach “Rules of Thumb” for the Fair Use of Copyrighted Materials. Like the Guidelines from which they are in some cases derived, the Rules of Thumb are tailored to different uses of others’ works. But unlike the Guidelines, they are short, concise, and easy to read.

How To Give A Great Presentation

What follows are nuggets gleaned from anexcellent article from To-Done that should help whether you’re speaking at a large conference, giving a small internal presentation to you coworkers or classmates or giving a sales pitch….

Think before you speak. Take pauses…
Visualize a positive outcome…
Keep text to a minimum. No more than 5 bullet points per slide…
Use pictures to get your idea across. They’re easier to remember…
Avoid complicated charts and graphs…
Think positive.
Tell stories…
Don’t read your slides. They should support what you are saying, not be what you are saying. The same goes for your notes.
Keep your intro short and strong…
Keep it slow and steady…
Don’t agonize over mistakes, and don’t say you’re sorry. Keep confident and if you mess up—move on.
Pause to let strong ideas sink in…
Smile, joke and laugh if appropriate. A little humor can go a long way, but don’t over do it.
Learn from your mistakes….
End strong. Make your finale crisp, clean and powerful.
Be prepared for interruptions and questions. If you are doing well, you’ll have lots of questions.”

How To Give A Great Presentation

How to Study Guide

I wish I would have known about this when I was in school:

“A very good guide on How to Study including the following sections: 1) Introduction, 2) Manage your time, 3) Take notes in class & rewrite them at home, 4) Study hard subjects first & study in a quiet place, 5) Read texts actively & slowly, before & after class, 6) Do your homework, 7) Study for exams, 8) Take Exams, 9) Do research & write essays, 10) Do I really have to do all this?…”

Via this Marcus P. Zillman post.

Presentations from Startup School 2005

For more on Startup School held at Harvard on October 15, 2005, including copies of slide shows and mp3 versions of presentations, see the Presentations (Startup School Wiki) site.

Notes from Startup School 2005

Here are a few nuggets from Robbie Allen’s Startup School Notes regarding the presentation and Q&A session with Langley Steinert, Co-Founder, TripAdvisor:

“Lessons learned:

+Follow your passion…
+Do it for the right reason
Don’t do it for money.
Do it because you have passion for the idea…
+Choose your Founders very carefully…
+Be very picky about your first 10 hires…
+Raise as little money as possible
+Don’t get big fast – that’s why most bubble companies crashed…
Chuckles when he sees press releases stating “I raised $20 million”. It should have a subtitle: “I just gave up half my company.”
+Explore Angel investors…
+Don’t be afraid of change…
+Keep an eye on the exit signs…
Don’t pass up a “reasonable” acquisition offer, might be your last…”