Digital Entrepreneurship

Digitisation and the associated technological breakthroughs offer enormous challenges and opportunities. Given the rapid pace of technological change, questions arise: How can newly emerging business opportunities be identified and realized? Start-ups are predestined to take advantage of business opportunities in this context due to their flexibility and decreasing resource requirements, which digital technologies often make possible. This theory-based and action-oriented course provides an overview of digital core technologies and how strategies and instruments such as digital-focused start-ups can be founded and established on the market.

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to: (1) explain why, when and how digital start-ups develop, (2) explain why and how some digital start-ups effectively integrate digital technologies and some are more successful than others, (3) systematically choose between different approaches to how digital start-ups are created and deployed.

This course is intended for Master students.

Organizational details

Date: Mondays from 12:15 - 13:45 (lecture) & 14:00 - 15:30 (tutorial)
Start: October 28th, 2024
Location: A.2.1 (Innovation Center), Seminarraum 0.01 
(Exception on 04.11.2024, for this date the location will be announced on Moodle)

Contact person: s8rastef(at)stud.uni-saarland.de
Registration possible via moodle (https://moodle.uni-saarland.de/course/view.php?id=10414) until 27.10 (60 participants)

 

Learning objectives

After attending the module "Digital Entrepreneurship" students are able to use different tools and techniques from the entrepreneurship field to make decisions in an entrepreneurial environment characterized by uncertainty. In particular, challenges and approaches that arise from increasing digitalization and the associated development of new technologies and that are consequently applied in digitally focused start-ups will be addressed.

In the module "Digital Entrepreneurship" different decision strategies and frameworks from research and practice are presented, which are clearly oriented towards a multitude of concrete examples and applications. The goal of this course is to give students a profound understanding of the relevance, requirements, structures and methods of digital start-ups.

Literature (extract)

  • Duening, T. N., Hisrich, R. A., and M. A. Lechter 2020. Technology Entrepreneurship: Taking Innovation to the Marketplace. Academic Press.
  • Evers, N., Cunningham, J., and Hoholm, T. 2017. Technology Entrepreneurship: Bringing Innovation to the Marketplace. Red Globe Press.
  • Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y., Bernarda, G., and Smith, S. 2015. Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want. Wiley.
  • Pioch, S. 2019. Digital Entrepreneurship: Ein Praxisleitfaden für die Entwicklung eines digitalen Produkts von der Idee bis zur Markteinführung. Springer Gabler.
  • Whittington, D. 2018. Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Cambridge University Press.