USMx, UMD: Creating Innovative Business Models

The course provides an innovative model to create the value proposition, team strategy, market strategy, and financial strategy to:

• Effectively design value propositions that directly align with your target customers’ interests;
• Assemble and lead an well-comprised team to produce results that create value for your customers;
• Pursue big ideas that really matter to customers; and
• Craft a financial model that minimizes risks and maximizing your success.

With these skills, you will be equipped to lead customer discovery and customer validation, understand business strategy and customer segmentation, create innovative products, enter new markets, design revenue models with predictable revenue stream, and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Module 1: Value Proposition

A value proposition describes the benefits customers can expect from your product or service. You must understand and validate the set of customer needs and wants before launching the venture. Before assuming that these needs and wants are true, it’s important to validate that they do indeed exist. To understand value propositions, we’ll examine how to define the problem, understand competition, and achieve product-market fit.

Module 2: Team Strategy

Building your startup team is one of the most important activities that you will engage in as a startup entrepreneur or corporate innovator. We’ll discuss how to identify and engage the founding team.

Advisers can also assist in reaching your goals quicker, and achieving more sooner. We’ll discuss how to establish adviser relationship, and how to leverage their skills and relationships.

Beyond founders and advisers, partners are often a fundamental element of the team equation. We will explore how to establish and manage partnerships. We’ll also discuss how outsourcing can improve your success.

Module 3: Market Strategy

Marketing may be basically defined as “putting the right product in the right place, at the right price, at the right time”. While simple in concept, significant research, analysis, and planning is required to develop and implement the strategy.

In this segment, we will introduce the Four Ps (product, price, placement, and promotion), the history and purpose of the marketing mix concept and terminology, key features of the marketing mix, and how to develop the marketing mix.

Module 4: Financial Strategy

In the final segment of the course, we’ll explore the financial strategy with attention to the revenue model, cost model, sales model, and funding model. We will discuss developing your revenue model, types of revenue streams, ways to generate revenue streams, selling strategies, and the pros and cons of various funding mechanisms.