Start-up Training

Initial situation

The Swiss Innovation Promotion Agency (Innosuisse) promotes the collaboration between science and market through innovation projects, networking, training and coaching. Its goal is to facilitate business innovation in Switzerland and to ensure the success of Swiss start-ups, products and services. The Agency supports innovative projects that would not be able to see the light of day without funding or that do not exploit their commercial potential.

The agency has mandated sciences2market to offer a semester-long entrepreneurial training program adapted to the university public (EPFL innovation park) in Western Switzerland (Geneva, Lausanne, Fribourg and Yverdon).

Rather than a classic academic program taught by a faculty member, the choice was made to use entrepreneurs or professional coaches as trainers and to rely on an active and very practical teaching approach.

The Business & Society course is part of the Bachelor of Economics and Management program. Its main objectives are to examine the relationship between ethics and business; to identify, analyze and resolve ethical dilemmas in business; to investigate ethical principles of leadership; and to gain an overview of the issues surrounding corporate social responsibility. Another key objective of the course is to encourage students to be critical and independent thinkers. It is about giving them the tools to help them in their future professional lives to promote a more responsible way of doing business and to prepare them for the challenges of real-life work such as discrimination or the fear of speaking out in ethically sensitive situations.

With the health crisis of 2020 and the move of the course online, the teacher observed the difficulty of students to follow the course in the usual format of 3 hours ex-cathedra. She wanted to give a dynamic and interactive dimension to the course and find solutions to encourage students to develop their critical thinking skills. The teacher wanted to find ways to engage students as much as possible given the distance learning and to find ice-breaking activities during the online sessions. The challenge was significant because of the size of the group.

Project implementation

This program is open to all students, doctoral students, post-doctoral fellows, teachers at universities of applied sciences and universities (including research institutions). It is also open to people with experience in research and development in companies. The 4-hour courses are spread over 14 evenings. The certificate obtained from Innosuisse can be the object of an equivalence (4-5 ECTS credits according to the faculties/institutes).

This program is practice-oriented and focuses on the development and realization of start-ups. Designed by the EPFL Innovation Park and based on its experience in bringing start-ups to success, this program aims to meet the needs of the majority of participants who are in the early stages of their start-up projects. The training material for each topic has been co-developed by several entrepreneurs and experts, and is illustrated by the speakers’ real-life cases. Special efforts have been made to balance theory and practice, lectures and group discussions, short case studies and long-term group projects.

At the beginning of the course, participants have the opportunity to present their own start-up idea as an official course project during the project idea presentation session to the jury as well as to other participants and mentors/coaches. The best proposals are selected and for each project a team is formed during a one-day meeting (Boot Camp) of all classes (all 4 cities) on a Saturday. Participants whose ideas are not selected are invited to join one of their classmates. He/she is of course invited to develop his/her own project in parallel. Depending on the year and the number of projects, some participants also have the opportunity to work on entrepreneurial project ideas submitted by other start-ups, including non-profit NGOs or social impact start-ups. These projects will go through the same selection process, by the jury as well as by the participants.

Throughout the semester, presentations by different program speakers aimed at developing entrepreneurial skills (such as marketing, finance, technology management, etc.) will follow one another. At the same time, each participant is expected to play a particular role within their project team. Each week, a link to videos or introductory articles on the topic is sent to the participants. Each team is expected to do some preparatory work and specific deliverables are requested (including business models, IP protection strategy, preparation of pitches for investors, as well as 30 interviews with industry experts, customers and potential partners).

In addition to presenting their progress to the class leaders on a regular basis, teams will have the opportunity to regularly meet with their assigned mentors/coaches. These personalized coaching sessions will allow them to expand their network and potentially reframe their project based on the feedback they receive.

To make all the program resources available to the participants and to monitor the weekly progress of each project team, the Graasp learning platform was used. This free, easy-to-use platform was developed at EPFL. The great benefit of this platform is the possibility to create sub-spaces for each project team. Each team will be able to collaborate and share in its own folder a set of multimedia resources that will be visible to the whole teaching team.

The business project and individual participation are evaluated during the final presentation session. The grade for the project is weighted 20% on the participation in the group project development, 40% on the quality of various deliverables requested during the course by the program director and 40% on the quality of the final presentation and project by a committee of experts. If a participant is absent more than twice, no certificate will be issued at the end of the program.

The teacher redesigned her entire online course and thought about new teaching methods. To reduce the 3 hours course to a reasonable amount of time for online follow-up, the teacher split the course into 2 parts and set up a flipped classroom format. The online course was reduced to 1.5 hours. The rest of the time is dedicated to the students’ autonomous preparation: the course material (explanatory video, PowerPoint presentation of the course, Ted talk, readings, etc.) is made available on the Moodle space of the course and the students must go through the content each week of the course. Thus, the online course is dedicated to interactive moments of exchange.

The video (about 10 minutes) that the teacher offers before the course explains what will be covered during the week, both in the content available on Moodle and in the online course. This video also includes motivational messages for the students. During the course, the teacher uses Mentimeter quizzes, both to interrogate the knowledge gained from the pre-delivered material, but also to interact with the students by creating an ice-breaker activity. She then presents a summary of the key learning points from the material provided. A live exercise session is also provided as well as debate activities around key concepts or practical cases presented in comic book form. The teacher ensures that activities and teaching methods are alternated approximately every 20 minutes.

For students to be able to ask questions at any time, the teacher has also set up a forum on Moodle and encourages other students to respond to their peers.

To make certain courses more dynamic, the teacher sometimes invites external speakers to deliver part of the course. These interventions help to anchor the concepts. This year, the teacher was able to bring in a deontologist from the UNHCR and his team, a social enterprise manager from Cartier, an anti-smoking activist and an expert in gender equality.

Thoughts and advice

The originality of this program is that it is not taught by one teacher, but by a team of practitioners and professionals in the field of entrepreneurship. The program is very sensitive to student feedback, which is collected after each session. All these feedbacks allow the facilitators to question themselves and to adapt their interventions accordingly to improve the program from year to year.

The preparation of the different sessions of the program requires important logistics beforehand to organize each session according to the availability of the different speakers, mentors, and coaches.

To prepare the participants for certain sessions, they are provided with video clips. These videos required a lot of time and money, but they are now valuable resources to use in flipped classroom.

One of the main values of this program is that people with very different backgrounds and situations can work together on the same project. The same team can be made up of a bachelor’s level student in biology, another Master’s level student in computer science, a doctoral student in psychology and a professor in physics, for example. This heterogeneity of profiles and this intergenerational constitution of the groups can be very favorable for the progress of the projects.

It was important for the teacher to create a climate of trust with the students and to break the ice at the beginning of the course, especially for a fully distance learning course and for Bachelor students. She wanted to show her empathy for the students facing the difficult situation of studying during the year 2020. She herself did not hesitate to share her own feelings about the situation and to regularly check on their condition.

She observed that the online format had the advantage of sometimes freeing up speech and helped the shyest students to participate more easily. However, the mobilization of students in the breakout rooms on Zoom was not always possible because of the material conditions of work for some students (living in a shared apartment, studying in the library, etc.).

The teacher recommends not to undervalue the time that such a program requires to set up. It takes a lot of time to shoot video and edit it. It often takes several trials. It is also necessary to prepare the questions that are part of the course in advance and test them with the course assistants. Then you have to think about the planning of the course and the pedagogical coherence. Offering students so many alternative activities to animate the course and deliver the course content requires a great deal of commitment from the teaching team, both for the preparation and for the follow-up of activities and support throughout the year.

Student feedback

“An amazing opportunity to get expert professional training and to be part of the process of developing a business idea from the start!” “The Business Concept training program did cover all areas of entrepreneurship in a great way. Mentors have good critics and are very knowledgeable! I would recommend anyone willing to make a start-up to follow the course! “ “This course gave me the chance to learn from high level lecturer and great mentors. This is a real push to my motivation to create my own start-up.” “I am very thankful to all the trainers. I am a researcher in material science and novice in business but the trainings provide me a good insight of connecting the research and development to business. To start a business or market a product, as a scientist we should not be worried to much. even a simple useful innovation can make us rich. We need to figure out what do people need and pay for it. “ “Great course and introduction to entrepreneurship, especially for people of engineering background. It provides a good overview of all relevant topics such as market analysis, accounting, financial planning, team work, search for funding and presentation skills.” “I highly recommend to follow this course, it brings every thing you need to know about entrepreneurship! Of course, if you really want to build a strong start-up, you will need to work a lot more than just the home-works for the course, but we now have everything in hand to go further. I had a lot of pleasure to work with my team-partner, and every encounter with our mentors was really interesting. They helped us really greatly, always with much sympathy. ” “This comprehensive course offers a 360° view of what it takes to found a start up. You leave with a complete bag of tools to found your own business. Thank you for the great experience!”

ID 99 - Online courses & interactivity by Bettina Palazzo [11/21] “It’s really an engaging course. I really like the format 2h self-study and then 2h course because since it’s on Zoom, a 4-hour course would be really to long. I also like the study preparation material you give us because it’s really interesting to read/watch. Also, Mentimeter is a great way to have an active course, especially due to the situation.” “Making Mentimeter session at the beginning of the class is very helpful to understand the notions seen last weeks. By giving us some work to do before the session is also great because it allows us to have a better understanding of what we are going to talk then and gives us some examples referring to the what we see during the class session.” “I think, making groups of works is not helpful because some people don’t want to talk, are to shy to see that this type of person might be the leaders of tomorrow… But that’s even better to have a class like this to maybe put some more perspective for them and impact them differently and help them be better.” “I love that the professor always has a bright personality and isn’t afraid to share her point of view on matters. It’s really important for me, as a student in this course, to know the professor’s stance on what she teaches us.” “I follow the recordings to follow at my own pace/when I want to.” “A very interactive course. Slides nice to read, airy, pictures representative of the course, concepts well explained. Doing the course on zoom seemed more interactive. I would never have participated in a face-to-face course. “The strengths of the course? The humour and energy of the teacher; The reflection stimulated by the questions; Great discussions during the course; Explains very well the usefulness of this course for our future professional life; The self-study.” “It is not just pure theory like in many other courses. In this course we actively think and can debate our opinions. This allows us to create ideas for ourselves and not just spit out what we have learned in the course. I think this will be very useful when we take the exam for this course. “The mentimeter helps to test our knowledge, the self-prep study system is very good and the topics are always very interesting and current.”