Professor Craig Armstrong
Can your students start high-growth businesses with $10 or less? Mine can! When I used to run this activity, a classroom of 50 students would usually generate at least $10,000 out of $500 through individual effort. Educators, if you do this, be sure to have students send you weekly diary reports! Everyone else: you can do a lot with just a little cash and your boundless resourcefulness.
Current and Recent Courses
Sp2024 Courses
Two sections of MGT 481, New Venture Finance
W2023-34
MGT 482 and MGT 582, New Venture Development (problem to idea to problem-solution fit through personas, activity maps, solution sketches, and written pitch, culminating in a lean canvas and hypothesis development), December 11 2023 - January 8 20243.
Fall 2023 Courses
MGT 481, New Venture Finance, two sections, August 23 - December 8, 2023
Sp2023 Courses
MGT 481, New Venture Finance, two sections, January 11 - April 28, 2023
Winter 2022 Interim Course
MGT 482 and MGT 582, New Venture Development (problem to idea to problem-solution fit through personas, activity maps, solution sketches, and written pitch, culminating in a lean canvas and hypothesis development), December 12 2022 - January 3 2023.
Fall 2022 Courses
links will go "live" week of August 15-19
MGT 387, The Front End of Startups (pitching, ideation, hypothesis formation and testing, prototype development)
MGT 481, New Venture Finance (financial analysis, pro forma financials, stages and sources of financing, early stage venture valuation methods, capitalization tables, term sheets, making your venture and pitch more valuable)
Earlier Courses
New Venture Finance, MGT 481, Spring 2022
New Venture Finance, MGT 481, Fall 2021
New Venture Finance, MGT 481, Fall 2020
New Venture Development, MGT 482-582, Fall 2020 ("MGTX82" since it is cross-listed for undergraduate and graduate students)
Foundations of Entrepreneurship, MGT 386, Summer 2020
Creating, Discovering, Evaluating, and Pitching Opportunities, Spring 2020
New Venture Development, Winter Interim 2020
New Venture Finance, MGT 481, Fall 2019
New Venture Development, MGT 482-582 (cross-listed), Fall 2019
If you browsed here expecting New Venture Development then you're in the right place. Winter Interim 2019 and HEMBA 2019 curricula pages are hosted on this site, as are spring courses for 2019 (New Venture Finance and New Venture Creation), archives of previous courses I've created (Creating, Discovering, Evaluating, and Pitching Opportunities) and lots of resources for entrepreneurship education
Resources
Alums! I invite you to keep coming back to this site: for the rebuilds, new course offerings, frameworks, topics, techniques, phenomena, and for the occasionally updated FEED page. I try to teach every course just a bit differently from the last time I taught it. Keep up with the stuff textbooks can't iterate on fast enough.
Design Sprint (the Book) page with PPTs of slides for each day, videos, and other resources. Very useful for getting started with your ideas. I have run dozens of design sprints with doctoral students, seasoned research professors, executive MBAs, full-time MBAs, and undergraduate students. If you need someone to run a design sprint I'm your guy.
Community
Building a community of lifelong entrepreneurial learners begins with games and engagement.
[Above: Haitian children play a prototype of my Obje Chak Jou game. Find out more about this mission and this game here.]
Entrepreneurship isn't a topic you learn by sitting in a classroom and listening to lectures. Entrepreneurship is a set of skills, abilities, knowledge, and attitudes that require occasional - many would argue "constant" - augmenting and updating. Many of my students return to my materials years after they've graduated from college to see what I've developed based on latest frameworks, ideas, and other insights from the leading edges of entrepreneurship. That's why I don't hide my materials from students after the semester ends like #Blackboard does.
My logic for creating a game to build lateral thinking skills for children in Haiti was to help spark that lifelong approach to entrepreneurship to build entrepreneurial capacity in that nation.
Since 2/20/19
Originally intended as an ongoing assignment for students to identify odd, interesting, perplexing, whatever situations that are worthy of further consideration or could present untapped opportunities. Mandate: Emphasize a new way of looking at something that we generally accept as the ordinary or mundane to frame it in a new light.
Zettelkasten
May 5, 2021: I wanted to build my own Iron Man / Tony Stark version of Jarvis for research projects: I created an analog version using the guidelines of Zettelkasten, and you can too.
This site used to be a wikispace. > 130 countries, > 90,000 guests
Since 2012
I covered the planet with a lot of red dots in six years; Eric Ries would call this "vanity metrics," and he would be right. But it's still important to know that you have reach to help people learn entrepreneurship.