Tag: entrepreneurship

What makes a good entrepreneurship program?

Posted on | by Veronica Rafaniello | Leave a Comment on What makes a good entrepreneurship program?

 

Greta Maiocchi, head of marketing and recruitment at MIP Politecnico di Milano, answers our Applicant Question of the Week

 

Every week, we give you the opportunity to ask one of our chosen admissions experts anything you want to know about getting into business school. One question each week is chosen for our expert to answer.
This week, our question comes from an anonymous applicant, hoping to kick-start an entrepreneurial career through business school.
Their question is answered by Greta Maiocchi, head of marketing at the Milan-based MIP Politecnico di Milano.

 

Applicant Question of the Week

Dear BusinessBecause,

What are the best business school programs for someone hoping to become an entrepreneur, and how can I improve my chances of being accepted onto this kind of program?

 

The Answer

Within the collection of courses offered at MIP, the school provides several programs specifically focused on the topic of entrepreneurship, designed to meet the needs and aspirations of both future leaders who want to take their first step into the business world, and experienced professionals with the aim of updating their skill-set or searching for new opportunities.

First, we offer the International Master in Innovation & Entrepreneurship (IMIE), a 12-month program taught in English and designed for graduates with entrepreneurial mindsets.

Through the combination of class teaching, digital learning and on-site experiences, IMIE candidates will acquire the analytical skills and the creative thinking needed to become innovative leaders able to be in charge of developing and managing ground-breaking projects.

Participants on this program will access the Pre-incubation Lab, a nine month project co-designed and supported by Polihub – the internationally-renowned incubator at MIP – in which students are encouraged to work in groups and develop a full-fledged business idea.

Also on offer is the Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Startup module. This is a three-day course taught in Italian and delivered in partnership with the Politecnico di Milano’s in-house start-up incubator. The aim is to provide C-levels and professionals with a concrete vision of the development and evaluation methods of a startup in contemporary markets.

Participants can explore approaches and methods emerging from the world of startups, understand the issues surrounding corporate entrepreneurship, and acquire practical knowledge of design tools, assessment and development of new business models, useful for operating in a culture dominated by risk and innovation.

Although there are plenty of specially designed entrepreneurial courses to choose from, at MIP and elsewhere, undertaking a broader qualification such as an MBA or EMBA can also be beneficial for those with an entrepreneurial mindset.

These programs can often be tailored to support entrepreneurs, and provide a broad foundation for understanding how businesses operate.

For example, at MIP, MBA and EMBA participants can access Polihub, and carry out a supervised entrepreneurial project with faculty guidance as part of their qualification.

When it comes to being accepted onto a program, each one has a specific set of entry requirements. When applying for courses with an entrepreneurial focus, it’s important to understand that personality and passion are just as important as academic qualifications.

You must be able to demonstrate your ability to work in a team and possess a practical, agile mindset. Drawing attention to circumstances in which you have acted as leader is also helpful when applying to programs that focus on entrepreneurship.

Finally, having a clear vision of your ambitions for the future will also help selection committees understand exactly what you hope to get out of business school.

By using these selection criteria, business schools can create a network of high-value professionals able to enhance each other’s journeys, and impart a real impact on society.

 

Originally published on

 

How My MBA Degree Helped Me Become An Entrepreneur

Posted on | by albe@mip.polimi.it | Leave a Comment on How My MBA Degree Helped Me Become An Entrepreneur

After developing her skills during an MBA hackathon, Divya Singh is getting ready to launch her own luxury startup

The fashion world is changing as we move further into the 21st century. Right now, ‘uncertain’ is the industry’s buzzword for the state of play.

According a report by McKinsey & Company—The State of Fashion 2019—2018 was the year that saw fashion executives think less about survival and more about their brand’s strategic agenda and business model.

That those in the creative industries need to be business savvy is old news, and the knowledge accrued on an MBA program is just as important for those in fashion as it is for any other industry.

Divya Singh knows this all too well. With a background in fashion design, she enrolled on the International Part-Time MBA at MIP Politecnico di Milano to gain a holistic understanding of the business side of fashion.

How my MBA degree helped me become an entrepreneur

Divya—who is a current MBA student—says that MIP appealed to her because of the variation of case studies on offer, which allow students to focus on the industry they’re most interested in. MBAs can also enhance their education by taking elective weeks in modules on the Executive MBA.

It was the MBA competitions, though, that turned Divya into an entrepreneur, and put in her in the position to launch her own luxury startup.

She recently completed two competitions. The Mark Challenge hosted by the University of Monaco, and Shaping a Sustainable Digital Future, patroned by The Prada Group.

In Monaco, Divya and her teammate, Fabio Masoero Regis, developed a luxury service business plan, winning the competition with their startup idea UBIQUE: a digitized luxury concierge service.

They didn’t stop there though. As finalists from Italy for the Prada Competition, the pair flew to New York late last year, adapting UBIQUE to the sustainability ideals the challenge championed.

An intense two-day hackathon saw them team up with three non-MBA students from Yale University and present their idea to a board of Yale and MIP Politecnico di Milano professors, as well as executives from the Prada Group.

Divya thinks that it’s these experiences which distil the learning of an MBA, preparing her best for the turbulent future of the fashion industry.

“Working with students who weren’t MBAs, with people with backgrounds in architecture for example, meant we could perfectly merge business know-how with creativity,” she explains, “the competition allowed me to apply my MBA learning in a real and rewarding way.”

She adds that managing team dynamics was integral to their group’s success, as they worked in a high-pressure environment with demanding time constraints.

Divya says that she developed speedy decision making, patience when dealing with language barriers, and alternative ways of doing business with people from cultures different than her own.

The competitions have proved so valuable to Divya’s professional development that she is now getting ready to launch UBIQUE as a real-life startup.

That entrepreneurial mindset is an important part of the MBA at MIP Politecnico di Milano. The startup mentality is something the school helps to cultivate throughout the curriculum with the dedicated PoliHub incubator—ranked second in Europe and third in the world by UBI Global—which offers support and services to budding entrepreneurs.

Why creatives should study an MBA

It is, in part, because of these competitions that Divya believes MBAs are such important tools for creatives.

Whilst many complete an MBA for the rapid career progression and salary increase after graduating, Divya thinks creatives can tend to view an MBA as more of a tool for self-development.

It can help to position creative professionals well for disruptions in their respective industries, as they understand the nitty-gritty numbers as much as the creative process.

“If you don’t study things like finance operations it’s hard to pick them up on your own,” Divya says, “learning how to read reports, and how to understand your business from all viewpoints, puts you in a better position to genuinely evaluate how you’re doing.”

Divya also believes that her creative background is enhancing the dialogue of her class, as she’s providing an alternative outlook to business problems that many of her peers (from more traditional MBA backgrounds) are not familiar with but are equally excited about and benefiting from.

“Teamwork is the basis of all the competitions,” she concludes, “and it’s the mixture of backgrounds and nationalities that perfectly blend creative, analytical, and business thinking which MBAs can thrive off.”

 

Originally published on 

Startups: the “lean” route to success!

Posted on | by albe@mip.polimi.it | Leave a Comment on Startups: the “lean” route to success!

Do you have a brilliant business idea? Are you thinking of launching your own startup? If so, then keep reading and enjoy the tips Antonio Ghezzi, Professor of Strategy & Startups, has shared with us!

Startups and entrepreneurship are hot topics. Thus, when we heard of the latest article by Prof. Ghezzi – “Agile Business Model Innovation in Digital Entrepreneurship: Lean Startup Approaches” – we jumped at the opportunity to ask him for an interview.

Expressions like “agile business model” or “lean startup” may intimidate you, but Prof. Ghezzi’s explanation will make everything clearer.

 

What is the “lean startup approach”?

In the aftermath of WWII, companies needed to make the production process leaner and to cut waste. The answer was the “Toyota System”, the prelude to modern lean manufacturing.

Later, authors like Steve Blank and Eric Ries introduced the same “waste-reducing” idea to startups. They theorised that startups – traditionally short of money – could not afford to spend resources on something clients did not require.

 

Does this mean that innovation should originate only from customers’ demands?

Henry Ford used to say, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Actually, the lean approach does not totally transfer the innovation process to customers: it is still up to the entrepreneur to conceive brilliant ideas.

Yet, entrepreneurs often make a mistake. They see customers – those the product is made for – as “enemies”, since they are the final judges of the product’s success, and they may even reject it. Thus, in the attempt to make the product “perfect”, they invest a large amount of money upfront and delay the launch on the market. But there is an inner fallacy in this notion of perfection: through heavy investments, the product or service will become perfect only from the entrepreneur’s perspective, but not necessarily from the customer’s.

The lean approach tries to reverse the situation, inviting entrepreneurs to ask for customers’ opinions as soon as possible, in order not to waste resources on something the public may dislike.

The lean approach suggests that the business model – i.e. how the company creates value, delivers it and captures it – is validated by the market at each step. Traditionally, startups are very good at creating value, but they have problems in monetising it. The lean startup approach helps entrepreneurs to overcome this difficulty.

 

How does the validation process work?

Entrepreneurs have to translate their business idea into a series of falsifiable assumptions, about the services they want to sell, to whom, about marketing decisions, partnerships, etc.
Then they have to test them. How? By designing a Minimum Viable Product. Through the MVP – a basic sample of the product – entrepreneurs can collect customers’ feedback without investing too much money.

Dropbox’s MVP, for example, was a video. There was no code at all! It simply showed how to create folders and how to share them… It was played hundreds of thousands of times and it made the beta waiting list jump from a few thousands of “tech nerds”  to over 75,000 people overnight.

This is the difference between the lean startup approach and marketing research: the first is about what people do, the latter about what people say.

Another great example is Zappos, the online retailer. A few years ago, Nick Swinmurn – Zappos’ founder – thought of selling shoes online. However, would people buy them? At that time, the answer to this question was not all that predictable and testing was needed.

He therefore tried to replicate customers’ natural behaviour through a “fake” e-commerce website. It showed pictures and prices of shoes, inviting customers to buy them online. When people hit the “buy” button, nothing happened.
Nonetheless, this helped Zappos’ founder to collect important data: out of all the traffic generated on site, a given percentage of customers tried to buy shoes on his website. He got a metric – the conversion rate – that he could use to make real-world forecasts.

Testing is very important because it helps entrepreneurs to understand whether they have found the Product/Market Fit – a product meeting the needs of the market. Otherwise, it would be better to make the idea perish as a whole or slightly change it in order to meet customers’ feedback. This shift – called “Pivoting “– happens all the time.

Thanks to the lean startup approach, entrepreneurs can reduce the amount of time and money spent in validating a business model and speed up the achievement of the Product/Market Fit.

 

Thank you Prof. Ghezzi for this exciting lesson. Before saying goodbye, we have one more question. Can we apply the “lean startup approach” to any sector and company size?

This process works well in the digital context as it’s easier to create MVPs for digital products. Still, it can also be applied in others sectors, provided that minimum is not that minimum and you’re eager to raise the bar. In the end, it can be considered a cross-industry approach that even large companies or institutions are adopting within a strategic renewal and corporate entrepreneurship framework. Just consider that, in the US, it is even applied to the Defence Sector!