Title: INTRODUCTION
Course: INTRODUCTION TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to this module. You probably have heard about the term entrepreneurship. You could have formed and developed your own versions of what the term constitutes. In this module, we will introduce you to the basic concepts in entrepreneurship and why you should study it.  This is an interactive instructional module that uses both action and collaborative learning styles that provide you with diverse online learning experiences and effective learning processes. The key purpose of this module is to expose you albeit theoretically to the various types of businesses that there are, how you can create, protect and run one. This should hopefully equip you with the necessary attitudes, knowledge and skills crucial in creation and management of future businesses as well as cope with challenges and opportunities that may arise.

 In this module, we shall define the basic concepts in entrepreneurship and encourage you to develop your own understanding of entrepreneurial motivation. The module also introduces the concept of small businesses and entrepreneurial characteristics. You may have wondered why some people are able to see opportunities and exploit them while others can’t perceive such opportunities. The module takes you through the process of opportunity discovery, evaluation and exploitation and how to bring goods and services to the market through design thinking and innovation. The module further introduces you to the process of protecting your ideas through intellectual property rights (IPR). It guides you into the processes of seeking IP rights for your innovations and inventions. The legal forms of businesses are introduced to allow you gain knowledge and insights that will be used in making informed choices regarding legal matters. Since entrepreneurship involves management of small businesses, the module takes you through the business planning process starting with ideation through validation, market identification, creation of the entrepreneurial management teams, production of products and services to seeking of business finance.

 We hope that you will find this module exciting, educative, and engaging. We also hope that it stimulates your mind so that you can think entrepreneurially regardless of your academic pursuits. After all, entrepreneurship cuts across all fields of study and should be exploited if motivation allows.

INTRODUCTION TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP FLOW CHART

WEEK | TOPIC
WEEK 0: | INTRODUCTION (YOUR CONTEXT, YOUR GOALS, THOUGHTS ABOUT BUSINESS)
WEEK 1: | DEFINITIONS AND CONCEPTS IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP
WEEK 2: | ENTREPRENEURIAL MOTIVATION
WEEK 3: | CHARACTERISTICS AND TYPES, AND ROLES OF ENTREPRENEURS
WEEK 4: | IDEA GENERATION AND EVALUATION
WEEK 5: | THE CREATIVE PROCESS (DESIGN THINKING)
WEEK 6: | TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION PROCESS (DEVELOPING    PRODUCT PROTOTYPES)
WEEK 7: | INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
WEEK 8: | PROCESS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION
WEEK 9: | ENTREPRENEURIAL AWARENESS: LEGAL FORMS OF BUSINESS
WEEK 10: | BUSINESS PLANNING
WEEK 11&12 | EXAMINATION

OVERVIEW OF THE COURSE

Week 0: Introduction (Your Context, Your Goals)

This lesson is intended to help you acclimatize to blended learning and to create a community of learners who will motivate each other during the course.  You will be required to introduce yourself to your lecturer and colleagues either physically during a face to face session or even online before other academic interactions start. This will be at the discretion of individual universities and lecturers. It will be important to also state your context and goals as well as what you think about businesses. You can also share any experience that you may have regarding businesses.

Week 1: Definitions and Concepts in Entrepreneurship

In this first lesson, we lay the foundation for the entire course by defining the concept entrepreneurship and other related terms. The purpose of this lesson is to enable you understand fundamental concepts and theories of entrepreneurship.

Week 2: Entrepreneurial Motivation

In this lesson, we explore the internal and external factors that motivate people to become entrepreneurs. The purpose of this lesson is to encourage you to develop positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship as a career.

Week 3: Characteristics and Types, and Roles of Entrepreneurs

In this lesson, we introduce you to the topic of characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, types of entrepreneurs, and roles of entrepreneurs in the society. The purpose of this lesson is to inspire you towards modeling the right entrepreneurial characteristics.

Week 4: Idea Generation and Evaluation

This lesson focuses on idea generation and evaluation as a way of identifying business opportunities. In this lesson, we will identify creative ways in which entrepreneurs identify business opportunities. We will explore various ways of identifying a business opportunity, distinguished a business idea from a business opportunity and evaluating the viability of a business idea.

Week 5: The Creative Process (Design Thinking)

In this lesson, you will learn about the creative process of bringing your idea to life. This lesson focuses on the creative process or the design thinking process that involves developing a business model that will enable you conceptualize the intricacies of developing your business idea into an actual product prototype as expressed in the business canvas model.

Week 6: Technology and Innovation Process (Developing Product Prototypes)

In this lesson, we start moving to the practical aspects of the course. You will be required to use the knowledge acquired from Lesson 1-5 to develop the actual product that you will sell to your customers to relieve their pains and give them the gains that will result to them wanting to come over and over again for your product. You will therefore learn how to develop product prototypes.

Week 7: Intellectual Property Rights

This lesson is closely related to Lesson 6 because it exposes you to the concepts of intellectual property and intellectual property rights. The purpose of this lesson is to   equip you with the necessary knowledge for protecting the new ideas, innovations and inventions that you tried out in Lesson 6.

Week 8: Process of Intellectual Property Protection

This lesson builds on lesson 6 and 7 in that you will learn about the details of the process of protecting a business idea, innovation, or any other invention. Entrepreneurs and business persons need to know the basics of intellectual property protection. The purpose of this lesson is to enable you understand the process of intellectual property protection.

Week 9: Entrepreneurial Awareness: Legal Forms of Business

In lesson 6, you will learn how to develop a product prototype and lesson 7 gives you knowledge on how to protect it using intellectual property protection discussed in lesson 8.  This lesson therefore ties with lessons 6, 7 and 8 and seeks to expose you to legal forms of businesses and evaluation of how you can form one.

Week 10: Business Planning

This lesson is a culmination of all that you have been learning in previous lessons. It seeks to put your new-found knowledge and skills into practice in the form of a business plan. The lesson will therefore require you to demonstrate what you have learnt by requiring you to put all what you have learnt in one neat document that you can present to different stakeholders such as investors that are likely to invest in your business, the bank so that they use it to service your business a loan or even yourself to be able to keep track of the plans you have for your business and the action points that you are to take to ensure you run a successful enterprise.

Week 11&12: Examination

These two weeks bring together the work you have been doing to an end.  This course unit will be examined and will partially contribute to the award of the degree in the programme that you are undertaking. We acknowledge that different universities across East Africa may have different Semester dates. It is however anticipated that most Universities will have a minimum of 13 weeks’ semester. We have therefore placed examinations in the last two weeks but Universities are allowed to go with their schedules. Your university examinations regulations will apply.

MODULE LEARNING OUTCOMES

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

1. Acquire skills and knowledge necessary for starting enterprises
2. Cultivate positive attitudes toward self - employment
3. Equip yourself with problem-solving skills that will enable you to manage your own businesses
4. Think outside the box and nurture unconventional skills for future use.
5. Think creatively and differently about the opportunities and challenges in the society

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This is a common course unit meant for all students who are not taking a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. The rationale of offering the course is to equip students whose degree programmes are not business- related with knowledge and skills that can assist them to undertake entrepreneurial activities should the need arise. This common unit or course is usually taken in the first year of study and has no prerequisite unit. The general purpose of the course therefore is to introduce you to various concepts and theories in entrepreneurship. Emphasis will be placed on the motivation behind entrepreneurship, types of entrepreneurships and various business models that you can adapt as you plan to start businesses. Also covered will be Intellectual property rights and how you can integrate technology in business. The course will take you 39 instructional hours some of which will be covered face to face and others in online activities. You will therefore be required to set aside about 5 hours per lesson to complete this course successfully.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

This is a blended learning course that will utilize the flex model. This means that learning materials and instructions will be given online and the lessons will be self-guided with the lecturer being available briefly for face to face sessions and support and also on-site (online) most of the time. Your lecturer will be meeting you face to face to introduce a lesson and put it into perspective and you will actively participate in your search for knowledge by undertaking several online activities. This means that some of the 39 instructional hours of the course will be delivered face to face while other lessons will be taught online through various learner and lecturer activities. It is important for you to note that one instructional hour is equivalent to two online hours. Three instructional hours will be needed per week. Out of these, one will be used for face to face contact with your lecturer (also referred as e-moderator in the online activities) while the other two instructional hours (translating to four online hours) will be used for online activities otherwise referred to as e-tivities in the lessons. This will add up to the 5 hours requirement per lesson earlier mentioned. There are 27 online activities each taking at least two hours and totaling to 54 online hours. You are advised to follow the topic flow-chart given so that you cover at least a lesson every week.

You will be required to participate and interact online with your peers and the e-moderator who in this case is your lecturer. Guidelines for the online activities (which we shall keep referring to as e-tivities) will be provided whenever there is an e-tivity. Please note that since the online e-tivities are part of the learning process, they may be graded at the discretion of your e-moderator. Such grading will however be communicated in the e-tivity guidelines and feedback given as soon as possible after the e-tivity. The e-tivities will include but will not be limited to online assessment quizzes, assignments and discussions. There are also assessment questions that you can attempt at the end of every lesson to test your understanding of the lesson. The answers to all the assessment questions are at the end of the module after lesson 10. All the resource that have been used in this module in form of books are available under the resources section after the answers to the questions.

ASSESSMENT

It is important to note that the module has embedded certain learner formative assessment feedback tools that will enable you gauge your own learning progress. The tools include online collaborative discussions forums that focus on team learning and personal mastery and will therefore provide you with peer feedback, lecturer assessment and self- reflection.  You will also be required to do one major assignment/project that is meant to assess the application of the skills and knowledge gained during the course. The project score in combination with scores for e-tivities (where graded) will account for 30% of your final examination score with the remaining 70% coming from a face to face sit-in final written examination that will be guided by your university examination policy and procedures.

We wish you the very best of experiences in this course.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS                                                                                                        5

LESSON 1: DEFINITIONS AND CONCEPTS IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP          7

1.1          Introduction                                                                                                                        7

1.2          Lesson Learning Outcomes                                                                                             7

1.3          Assessment Questions                                                                                                    11

1.4          References                                                                                                                         12

LESSON 2: ENTREPRENEURIAL MOTIVATION                                                   13

2.1          Introduction                                                                                                                    13

2.2          Lesson Learning Outcomes                                                                                         13

2.3          Assessment Questions                                                                                                  16

2.4          References                                                                                                                      17

2.5          Further Reading                                                                                                            17

LESSON 3: CHARACTERISTICS AND TYPES, AND ROLES OF ENTREPRENEURS  18

3.1          Introduction                                                                                                                  18

3.2          Lesson learning outcomes                                                                                          18

3.3          Assessment Questions                                                                                                 21

3.4          References                                                                                                                     22

LESSON 4: IDEA GENERATION AND EVALUATION                                         23

4.1          Introduction                                                                                                                   23

4.2          Learning Outcomes                                                                                                      23

4.3          Assessment Questions                                                                                                 28

4.4          References                                                                                                                     29

LESSON 5: THE CREATIVE PROCESS (DESIGN THINKING)                        30

5.1          Introduction                                                                                                                  30

5.2          Learning Outcomes                                                                                                    30

5.3          Assessment Questions                                                                                               35

5.4          References                                                                                                                    36

LESSON 6: TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION PROCESS (DEVELOPING    PRODUCT PROTOTYPES)                                                                                          37

6.1 Introduction                                                                                                                           37

6.2          Learning outcomes                                                                                                     37

6.3          Assessment Questions                                                                                                42

6.4          References                                                                                                                    42

LESSON 7: INTELECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS                                                43

7.1          Introduction                                                                                                                 43

7.2          Learning Outcomes                                                                                                    43

7.3          Assessment Questions                                                                                                46

7.4          References                                                                                                                     46

LESSON 8: PROCESS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION       47

8.1          Introduction                                                                                                                  47

8.2          Lesson Learning Outcomes                                                                                        47

8.3          Assessment Questions                                                                                                 49

8.4          References                                                                                                                      50

LESSON 9: ENTREPRENEURIAL AWARENESS: LEGAL FORMS OF BUSINESS 51

9.1          Introduction                                                                                                                   51

9.2          Learning Outcomes                                                                                                      51

9.3          Assessment Questions                                                                                                55

9.4          References                                                                                                                    57

LESSON 10: BUSINESS PLANNING                                                                         58

10.1        Introduction                                                                                                                  58

10.2        Learning Outcomes                                                                                                    58

10.3        Business Plan Samples                                                                                               61

10.4       References…………………………………………………………………………..                     68

ANSWERS TO LESSON ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS…………………………...……           75

BOOK RESOURCES USED IN THE E-TIVITY TABLES ………………………  76

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