FSE301: Entrepreneurship and Value Creation
Completion of FSE 301: Entrepreneurship and Value Creation is a required course for fulfillment of one of the entrepreneurial components for the Grand Challenge program at ASU. This crash course in entrepreneurship guides students through ideation all the way to final sales of a product. The aim is to introduce students to what it means to be an entrepreneur and give insights into the venture development process. It is a hands-on course that involves working with an interdisciplinary team of both engineering and business students to identify a market opportunity and build a business. The course allows students to apply entrepreneurial concepts by laying a framework for identifying a problem, evaluating a market, and designing a marketable solution through innovative approaches.
My team was made up of two engineers and two business students from the W.P. Carey School of Business. Our team, Dynamix, chose to tackle a problem local to our ASU community, specifically related to incoming ASU freshmen students. As a new student entering college, there are many unknowns that cause significant amount of stress and anxiety while preparing for that first day on campus. Our product, The Freshman’s Guide to Arizona State University¸ was designed to provide incoming ASU students insight, tips, and advice on to what to expect upon entering college. Converse to general guidebooks available for freshmen, our product was specifically written by ASU students for ASU students using commentaries taken directly from current students. We compiled our book electronically and sold it through an electronic download. We partnered with our university’s admissions department to create a partnership in which the admissions team agreed to help promote our book through their online social media platforms, as well as to include promotional flyers in all freshmen orientation packets. Through individual marketing efforts along with support from this strategic partnership, we sold several dozen copies of our book and make an overall profit by the end of the semester.
Though this project may not immediately appear to relate to my specific Grand Challenges chosen theme, when taken in a more general sense, the goals of our book were to improve quality of life of incoming freshmen. Our book encompassed several broad categories, many of which reflected healthy lifestyle choices. We aimed to help students avoid many of the mental, physical, and emotional pitfalls that often occur that first year of college. By sharing stories from students who have already lived through these experiences and made many mistakes along the way, The Freshman’s Guide to ASU served to create an overall healthier culture for incoming students.
My experiences in this course reaffirmed my passion for startup culture and entrepreneurship. Through the need to rapidly iterate and form a business during the course of a semester, I made many mistakes that I was able to learn from and grow upon in future entrepreneurial endeavors. This course gave me an opportunity to explore starting a business and contributed to my passion to follow this path as I move forward in my future career aspirations. Since finishing this course, I have since began working on another startup initiative. I also have plans to work in the world of enterprise development, startups, or venture capital at some point in the future.