Bootstrapping for Entrepreneurs
Not every entrepreneur has the resources to grow a venture. In fact, most don’t. But growth in resource scarcity is possible – and even can be advantageous. The goal of this course is to show you how.
Course Information
Learn for Free
About this Course
Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of goals beyond available resources. This definition highlights a common challenge faced by entrepreneurs. This challenge is the lack of resources to pursue and grow one’s idea.
Is this challenge familiar to you?
In this course you will learn about the process – and importance! – of innovating in resource-scarce environments, because this is where innovation often happens.
Here’s the main point: resource scarcity not as an unsurmountable barrier, but a solvable problem. There are effective bootstrapping tactics and strategies. You can learn and apply them for the benefit of your venture and personal growth.
This course accompanies the existing MITx courses “You Can Innovate: User Innovation and Entrepreneurship” and “Product and Service Creation in the Internet Age.” As such, the curriculum of this course is based on the field of user innovation pioneered by Professor Eric von Hippel at MIT.
Ultimately, the goal of the course is to inspire you in a very practical way. We want you to know that you too can be the entrepreneur of your dreams.
What you'll learn
- Bootstrapping strategies and tactics
- How to harness innovation communities for entrepreneurial problem discovery and problem solving
- How to apply innovation toolkits in product innovation and development
Prerequisites
None
Meet your instructors
Eric von Hippel
T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Management and a Professor of Management of Innovation and Engineering Systems, MIT Sloan School of Management
Professor Hippel's research discovers and explores patterns in the sources of innovation and develops new processes to improve the “fuzzy front end” of the innovation process—the end where ideas for breakthrough new products and services are developed. In his most recent book, Democratizing Innovation (MIT Press, April 2005), von Hippel shows how communities of users are actually becoming such powerful innovation engines that they are increasingly driving manufacturers out of product development altogether—a pattern he documents in fields ranging from open source software to sporting equipment. This discovery has been used for a better understanding of the innovation process and for the development of new innovation processes for industry. He is currently leading a major research project to discover how these user innovation communities work, and how and whether the same principles might extend to many areas of product and service development. In addition, von Hippel is working with governmental and academic colleagues in the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom to develop new and modified governmental policies appropriate to the newly emerging innovation paradigm of user-centered innovation.
