The DO School Start-Up Lab

Taking your great ideas and making them a reality is never easy. The Start-Up Lab helps you stop dreaming and start DOing. Introducing you to the crucial steps necessary to get moving, it will help you focus your idea to have broader social relevance. Inspiring leaders, start-up funders and emerging social entrepreneurs will offer their insights and recommendations and help you to ask the right questions to successfully start up your own venture.

What will I learn?

• Have a clear idea about the societal relevance and value added by their venture and a plan for maximizing their social impact
• Have consolidated the project and resource planning for their venture
• Have developed their revenue model and financing strategy and taken first steps to fundraising for their venture
• Have defined their legal and organizational requirements and taken the first steps towards the set-up of their organization
• Have defined their human resource strategy and needs and taken action to meet them
• Know what is unique about their venture and how they communicate it to their target groups

What do I have to know?

No specific skills are required other than passion for an issue or topic that you want to work on in your society. However, this course is designed for people who have a concrete start-up idea as the course supports the actual implementation of relevant first steps towards implementing it. It will be also valuable for people who are still in the idea development process and want to be clear about what is involved in setting up their own venture.

Workload

We expect students to commit at least 12 hours a week in order to go through the course materials, fill in worksheets and do the necessary research and work on the implementation of their own venture on the ground.

Do I get a certificate?

Students can earn the official Statement of Participation by completing at least 80% of the course requirements.