The course content follows the process of creating and validating a new venture. The investor pitch deck and its oral defence will provide the visible backbone and integrative outcome of the course. Each session will add, revise or remove part of the deck based on research, decisions, tests and verifiable results. The working sequence will follow the generation of evidence; the final narrative sequence may be reorganised to communicate that evidence clearly.

Prior knowledge and curricular coordination

The course will apply —without re-teaching from the beginning— prior knowledge of PESTEL, SWOT, Porter’s Five Forces, Resource-Based View, Breakeven Point, and legal and ownership forms.

Blue Ocean Strategy will be new course content and will be introduced before students apply it to differentiate their ventures.

Content relating to costs, margins, Breakeven Point and unit economics will be coordinated with Financial Accounting to ensure that students have the required foundation before applying it to their projects.

Students taking Business Digital Transformation concurrently must use a real company for their Digital Audit that is different from the venture developed in this course.

Students wishing to continue developing their venture will be directed towards the Startup Pioneer Programme as an opportunity for applied work and access to mentors and the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

1. Entrepreneurship from 0 to 1: problem, customer, hypotheses and team

• The founder’s work under uncertainty: starting with a real, specific, observable and addressable problem.

• Opportunity generation and selection by applying PESTEL and SWOT, analysing trends and using an idea-prioritisation matrix.

• Selection of a specific initial customer based on frequency, intensity, urgency and willingness to invest time or money.

• Distinguishing facts, behavioural evidence, interpretations and hypotheses; selecting and aligning the founding team.

• Deck sections: provisional cover, customer, problem and the team’s initial thesis.

2. Customer, problem and insight

• Customer discovery through non-leading interviews focused on past episodes and behaviours, avoiding hypothetical or confirmatory questions.

• Distinguishing opinion, behaviour and evidence; reconstructing the trigger, context, alternative, cost and consequence.

• The Empathy Map as a disciplined synthesis and Jobs-to-be-Done as a functional, emotional and social lens.

• Identifying early adopters, designing the interview guide and conducting at least five initial customer discovery interviews per team.

• Deck sections: customer, problem and unique insight, supported by a concise interview synthesis.

3. Solution and value proposition

• The solution as a promise of a specific outcome for a particular customer, rather than an inventory of features.

• Value Proposition Canvas: a Customer Profile grounded in interviews and a Value Map treated as a hypothesis.

• Generating and selecting alternative value propositions based on problem relevance, evidence, differentiation and ease of testing.

• Deck sections: value proposition, solution and smallest product experience.

4. Market strategy and differentiation

• Scan–diagnose–design sequence: applying PESTEL and Porter’s Five Forces as prior knowledge and introducing Blue Ocean Strategy to redesign the proposition.

• Competitor and alternative mapping: direct competitor, indirect alternative, and the customer’s current solution or inaction.

• Eliminate–Reduce–Raise–Create and the formulation of a valuable, defensible and testable advantage. Applying the RBV lens to the Business Model Canvas’s key resources: value, scarcity, difficulty of imitation and difficulty of substitution.

• Deck sections: competition, differentiation and strategic hypothesis.

5. Business model, pricing and market size

• The Business Model Canvas as a system of relationships between customer, proposition, payer, channel, delivery, costs and revenue.

• Business model patterns; the distinction between user and customer; and the form, frequency and rationale of payment.

• Pricing based on costs, competition, demand and perceived value; reasoned estimation of TAM, SAM and SOM; and application of the Breakeven Point to initial economic feasibility.

• Deck sections: business model, pricing and market size.

6. Proof of Concept and feasibility testing

• The Proof of Concept as a focused test of the highest-risk assumption, designed to assess desirability, technical feasibility or economic feasibility before committing significant resources.

• Pre-validation plan: critical assumption, feasibility dimension, participant, observable action, metric, threshold, duration, sample, cost and ethical limits.

• Proof of Concept formats: landing page or fake door, reservation or deposit, concierge service, clickable prototype, technical demonstrator, pilot or verifiable commercial proposal.

• Executing the Proof of Concept through at least five documented validation sessions with relevant potential customers, recording results and deciding whether to continue, revise or discontinue the proposition or approach.

• Deck sections: Proof of Concept, validation plan, results and learnings.

7. Market validation and go-to-market planning

• Go-to-market as a testable plan covering the initial segment, channel, message, offer and sales process; founder-led sales discipline and manual onboarding.

• Commercial validation funnel: target segment, outreach, qualified conversation, proposition or test, commitment or conversion, and repeat behaviour where applicable; selecting the behaviour that demonstrates value.

• CAC, contribution margin, payback, LTV and churn where the data allow, with assumptions stated explicitly when sufficient evidence is not yet available.

• Designing and executing an initial market test with a channel, message, offer, CTA and threshold; deck sections: go-to-market plan, market validation, traction, KPIs and applicable unit economics.

8. Team, finance and fundraising

• Real functional responsibilities, team complementarity, founders’ agreement, vesting, decision rules and hiring needs linked to the roadmap.

• Selection of the legal form and ownership structure; cap table, pre-money and post-money valuation, priced round and proportional dilution.

• Monthly burn, runway, 18-month roadmap, the decision whether to raise capital, and calculation of the ask based on the milestone to be financed.

• Deck sections: team, roadmap, fundraising ask and use of funds.

9. Investor Deck and Demo Day

• Building a sequence of assertions —problem, solution, evidence, scale and ask— and selecting what is essential for the investor.

• One main idea per slide, assertion-based headlines, labelled figures, source and date where relevant, and detailed material moved to the appendix.

• Five-minute pitch, direct answers to questions, evidence-based defence and repeated practice before the class.

• The final deck will include approximately 10–12 main slides and a selective evidence appendix for each team. A separate evidence log will not be required, and a different structure will not be penalised if it improves understanding of the venture.