This skills course is focused on developing your competence at two important tasks for the launching of entrepreneurial ventures: [1] spotting opportunities, [2] developing business concepts that could be deployed to exploit discovered opportunities.

Entrepreneurial opportunities are rarely discovered through systematic search, yet systematic search can play a critical role in the further development of embryonic ideas for new business. Creativity plays a key role in opportunity recognition, ideation, and in business concepting. Yet, entrepreneurs usually also need to be creative in mobilising resources (people, capital, equipment etc.), in starting-up, and in growing their business. That is why this skills course helps you to develop your creative problem solving skills.

Creativity plays an important role in several, maybe all, aspects of what makes Organisations work and flourish. Creativity is also an essential skill for entrepreneurs to master if they want to start, build and grow a company. But on the other hand, the concept of creativity is barely understood. Is creativity a personality trait, is it something you can learn by exercise, is it the outcome of a process, or something that is greatly dependent on the environment of the creative person? If you want to build a creative company is it sufficient to hire creative people, do creative individuals make up a creative team, does the "creative personality" exist?

During this skills course we will touch upon all these important aspects of creativity. But, most of all, we will try to find ways to develop your own creativity. The starting point of the training is the fact that everyone is creative, that creativity is a skill that can be learned and trained. We will follow different paths to help you to investigate your own creativity and to find the best way to improve your creative skills.

Lumsdaine, E., & Binks, M. 2006. Entrepreneurship from Creativity to Innovation: Effective Thinking Skills for a Changing World: Trafford Publishing.
Epstein, R. 2000. The big book of creativity games: quick, fun activities for jumpstarting innovation. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Reader with papers & cases

The courses of the Entrepreneurship minor (see also http://maastrichtentrepreneurship.nl/minor.html) draw on the scholarly entrepreneurship literature. They do NOT expect that you have already developed an understanding of the functional domains of business administration or small business management (e.g. strategy, marketing, accounting, HRM, finance, operations). We encourage you to take the two introductory courses of the minor ("Birthing new ventures" and "Mobilising resources" ) BEFORE taking the other courses of the Minor. As this minor is delivered in English, your command of the English language in speech and writing should be good enough to actively prepare for, participate in, and contribute to the classes.