Best Free MOOCs In Business In May

You Can Innovate: User Innovation & Entrepreneurship

School: MIT

Platform: edX

Registration Link:  REGISTER HERE

Start Date: May 2, 2017 (6 Weeks Long)

Workload: 6 Hours Per Week

Instructors: Eric von Hippel and Erdin Beshimov

Credentials:  von Hipple is a professor of technological innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management (along with teaching in the school’s engineering systems division). A Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University, von HIpple’s research focuses on the “nature and economics of distributed and open innovation.” His work is also geared towards developing “practical methods that individuals, open user communities, and firms can apply to improve their product and service development processes.” Best known for writing Democratizing Innovation, von Hipple is a distinguished researcher who has served on the editorial and advisory boards of many leading journals, including Research Policy, Organizational Science, and the Internal Journal of Entrepreneurship Education. In 2013, he received the Humboldt Foundation Research Prize.

An entrepreneur and an academic, Professor Beshimov is the co-founder of the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Boot Camps, the source for this online course. Armed with an MBA from MIT, Beshimov entered academia after co-founding Ubiquitous Energy and serving as the principal at Flagship Ventures. As a student, he also launched the MIT Entrepreneurship Review.

Graded: Students can purchase a verified certificate for $500.

Description: The big idea. The breakthrough. Divine inspiration. It goes by many times. Think of it as the entrepreneurial holy grail, that epiphany that ultimately topples business models and disrupts entire industries. Think Netflix, Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb. Of course, those ideas don’t just pop up and take life. Instead, they stem from a mixture of blending, testing, failing, and re-calibrating. So where do you even start? Think dissatisfaction…with cost, features, scale, or delivery. In sum, ideas — and innovation — ultimately begins with seeking an alternative to the status quo. It takes wings when you find a like-minded community with the passion and technical know-how to take it to the next level…a community like MIT.

In this course, students will explore innovation through following: “the distinctions between, user and producer innovation; co-forming of need and the solution; fundamental business concepts such as sticky information and low-cost innovation niche; the role of the principal/agent problem in innovation; and the key pathways for diffusion of innovation.” The course is also treated as preparation for the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, where teams build and launch companies over a five day period.

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