Storytelling for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
Offered By: Davidson College via edX
Course Description
Overview
The Professional Certificate in Storytelling for Aspiring Entrepreneurs distills startup principles and the art of storytelling into a practical guide for aspiring startup entrepreneurs and corporate innovators.
Anyone can become a successful entrepreneur or corporate innovator by thoughtfully examining a business opportunity in a scientific manner while leveraging the power of storytelling to speak to the hearts of customers. Unlike most entrepreneurship and storytelling courses, this storytelling for entrepreneurs program is supercharged by weaving proven startup strategies with critical communication tools. This dynamic approach will allow you to cultivate and integrate the foundational human skill of storytelling to more powerfully and effectively reach customers. By harnessing these key insights, you’ll learn to create and transform your business idea into a new venture while increasing your probability for success. This experience is valuable for startup entrepreneurs and corporate innovators alike. Those interested in developing and commercializing their own ideas into a product or service will do so as a function of achieving the skills actively shared via this Professional Certificate.
By leveraging proven Lean Startup methodologies, the four week Jumpstart into Entrepreneurship course, will help you save time, money, and resources. Through the build-measure-learn framework, you will establish and continuously improve the effectiveness of new products, services and ideas quickly and cost effectively. Together we will create a cycle of creating and testing hypotheses by building a Minimum Viable Produce (MVP) for prospective customers to try early. Customers’ reactions to the initial version of your concept will provide valuable feedback, enabling you to learn from the results and subsequently iterate and improve your concept. By repeating this cycle, you will continuously improve your offering through intellectual honesty and informed decision making so that you eventually deliver precisely what your customers want and ultimately achieve product market fit.
At their core, the best businesses and entrepreneurs are storytellers. Great storytellers don’t sell products or services, they sell feelings and emotions. By becoming a great storyteller you will create an experience for customers to connect more deeply to your concept. The skill of storytelling will enable you to naturally sell experiences that prospective customers perceive in their mind and keep in their heart.
Through completion of the two courses included in this innovative program, you will gain a superpower, enabling you to implement best practices of communication in both written and verbal forms to become a more captivating, confident, and successful entrepreneur in order to bring your new concept into the hands of prospective customers or internal corporate stakeholders. Entrepreneurial storytelling takeaways include how to take a good story and make it a great story, a proven approach to tell an effective story and business story including tips for a good story, as you share your own story of your entrepreneurial journey from your own life with others, so that you can learn storytelling techniques from a business point of view.
The only prerequisite for this professional certificate is a growth mindset and willingness to try new things.
Syllabus
Course 1: Building a Lean Startup
Based on Eric Ries's influential book The Lean Startup , this course will bring your business idea to life with the help of time-tested tools and strategies employed by some of the world’s most successful startups.
Course 2: Applied Storytelling
In this interactive and dynamic course, you will learn how to establish and integrate the art of storytelling more powerfully into your career and everyday life.
Courses
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Turning your business idea into a company can feel intimidating and getting started may be overwhelming. This practical, hands-on entrepreneurship course is taught by a founder of multiple successful business startups and provides step-by-step guidance to go from concept to product-market fit and beyond. In one comprehensive, fast-paced startup course, you will gain tools and strategies employed to build some of the world’s most successful business owners. ****
We’ll start off by helping you learn entrepreneurship by building an entrepreneurial mindset to establish a foundation to thrive as a business owner and discover proven methodologies to identify problems as business opportunities. From there you will learn how to validate your new product or service by interviewing potential customers and testing an early version of your solution known as a Minimum Viable Product, or ‘MVP’. Once your product or service is in the hands of customers, you will learn how to measure its strengths and weaknesses to guide changes based on data and ultimately scale to a wider audience. ****
By leveraging the Lean Startup methodology, you will dramatically improve your odds of success by saving time, money, and resources while helping your idea go to market through customer feedback. What’s more, you’ll flip your assumptions on their head: Rather than writing a lengthy business plan, building a product, and then trying to find customers, the Lean Startup approach will help you position your concept as a hypothesis which you’ll learn how to validate and test on real customers. By the end of the course, you will have completed a comprehensive roadmap for your business’ launch. From there, the sky's the limit!
This course credits the work of Eric Ries who wrote, "The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses", a book describing his proposed lean startup strategy for startup companies. Ries developed the idea for the lean startup from his experiences as a startup advisor, employee, and founder.
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There is no art form as eternal or essential as storytelling. It conjures images across time and space: whether experienced around the campfire, the holiday dinner table, or within the confines of a good book, storytelling is everywhere. And, as the business world of the 21st Century has discovered, intentional and impactful storytelling provides one of the most indispensable competitive advantages on the market. An empowered, aware storyteller interviews, inspires, leads, and manages more effectively than someone who dismisses a story purely as a form of entertainment. ****
In this Applied Storytelling course, you will learn how to integrate this foundational human skill more powerfully into your career. Over the course of 4 self-paced weeks, you will train in vocal and physical performance techniques that will support your public speaking; you will engage in all the different types of story that shape our professional world; you will learn how to tell a story and practice in scenarios including digital storytelling and oral storytelling that will help launch or advance your career goals as a storytelling practitioner; and you will understand how to implement best practices of storytelling to enliven the day-to-day of your job. ****
No experience is necessary to enroll! You might be asking, “Which sorts of careers will benefit from this class?” Well, the answer is “All of them.” While some fields may seem more inclined toward story than others, everyone in the workforce encounters moments of stage fright where they can apply storytelling to become more captivating, confident, successful humans.
Taught by
Steve Kaliski and Rebecca Weeks Watson
Tags
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