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Learning from Silicon Valley: Entrepreneurship and Business Venturing

Vak
2013-2014

Learning from Silicon Valley 2014

Silicon Valley is known for its ground-breaking entrepreneurs and investors setting-up new companies which subsequently become global players and develop into new industries. In less than forty years, a vibrant regional cluster in between San Francisco and San Jose (North California) has emerged in which start-up entrepreneurs, investors, larger firms, universities and other supportive institutions thrive and are considered the examples for much of the rest of the world.
Some important questions on this phenomenon we want to consider in this course:
do we have really good reasons to assume that entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley do better than their counterparts elsewhere?
Have start-up companies in Silicon Valley achieved things that could (probably) not have been achieved elsewhere?
If so (in general or in particular contexts), what are the most important drivers of these successes?
Is it the entrepreneurs, is it the context, is it the interactions between entrepreneurs and institutions or is it simply the climate?
And then: what may entrepreneurs (you perhaps one day sooner or later?) in other areas of the world learn from this?
If an entrepreneur encounters the opportunity of a lifetime, should she go to Silicon Valley to exploit it (like Mark Zuckerberg did), or is he better off elsewhere?

These questions and some will be what the course is about. Nobody (as far as we know) has THE answers to these questions. Which means you will have to find out for yourself together with your fellow students on the course. Obviously, crucial part of such a mission is a fact-finding trip to see for yourself the companies and people who make it happen and can tell you about the experience first-hand. In addition, you will work on a number of assignments which will further develop your insights in what it means to be an entrepreneur and how as an entrepreneur you might try to optimize your chances.

An additional challenge is that this course will be populated by a mix of students from Erasmus, TU Delft and Leiden University. So you will have to do team work with people who might have quite a different view of the world, which we expect (actually, we know) you will learn from a lot, next to achieving a considerable expansion of your network.
Unfortunate perhaps, but this course is not suited for everyone. In fact, only about 25 students can join. This means 5 – 10 students per university. You need to be a master student with some experience, either by having followed courses on business and entrepreneurship or by having appropriate experience as an entrepreneur (having both is even better of course) to be qualified for participating.

Finally, the course comes at a price: the costs of the trip to Silicon Valley. They are estimated to be around Euro 1,500 per student. This amount is to be reduced to Euro 750 by inviting sponsorship and supporting you in getting payment for the consultancy assignment for the companies involved. But, as usual in entrepreneurship, there is no certainty if and to what extent the costs can be reduced.

The course will start on May 12, 2014. However, we want to have the student group together at least three months before, say around February 24, to make sure we all get properly prepared for the trip and to have ample time to try and raise as much money as possible to cover the costs. So to give us ample opportunity to make a good selection, the application deadline is February 17. Interviews with selected candidates will take place in the morning of this week.