he workshop focuses on the very early stages, i.e. when founders only have a piece of technology and a rough idea of the potential market. During these early stages, focus should not be on excessive analysis and long-term business planning. Instead, founders should specify the central assumptions on which the business idea is based (e.g. who are our customers, what problem do we solve for them, how costly is the problem, what product features are critical) and then test these as quickly and effectively as possible, to see if these assumptions are correct or need to be revised. As a general rule, the more innovative a technology/business idea is, the more likely it is that the initial assumptions are incorrect and the less valuable long-term planning is.

Specifically, we will focus on the following two tools:

• The Business Model Canvas, which is a comprehensive framework for describing the assumptions underpinning a business, e.g. Who is the customer, What problems are we solving for them, What is our offering (product/service/IP), How do we reach the customers with our offering, What should we charge for it etc.

• The Customer Development Process, which is a process for testing, adjusting and hopefully validating the assumptions on which the new business is based. This process has successfully been used in an NSF project headed by Steve Blank of Stanford.

Registration is free but limited!
Send an email to Vicky.wandels@ugent.be

Henrik Berglund – BIO Henrik Berglund is an associate professor at the division of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Chalmers University of Technology. Besides teaching and traditional research, Henrik is engaged in several action oriented research projects that seeks to develop and evaluate practically useful tools and processes for startups. He spent 2008 at Stanford as a visiting scholar. http://henrikberglund.com/