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 enhancement of embryonic ideas for new business. Creativity plays a key role in entrepreneurship as it affects opportunity recognition, ideation, and business concepting. Furthermore, entrepreneurs usually also need to be creative in mobilising resources (people, capital, equipment etc.), in starting-up Winning initial customers), and in adapting their organisation to the requirements of sustainable growth. That is why this skills course helps you to develop your creative problem solving skills. Of course, competence at creativity and concept development could also prove valuable outside entrepreneurship.

Throughout the course we seek to not work in a classroom but in a true creativity lab: the ideas that you
develop may have merit beyond this course.

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, or is it something you can learn by exercise? Is it the outcome of an individual 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.

In this course you will explore how existing products and novel technologies can provide a starting point for
product ideation and business concepting.

- Lumsdaine, E., & Binks, M. 2006. Entrepreneurship from Creativity to Innovation: Effective Thinking Skillsfor a Changing World: Trafford Publishing (this is suggested not required literature).
- Epstein, R. 2000. The big book of creativity games: quick, fun activities for jumpstarting innovation. NewYork: McGraw-Hill (this is suggested not required literature).
- papers.

The courses of the Entrepreneurship minor 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). You must have taken at least two out of four minor courses ( i.e. EBC2144, EBC2145, EBC2146, EBC2147 ) BEFORE starting this skill. 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.