1-Credit Sprints

For a self-employed entrepreneur or as an employee who works for someone else, an innovative outlook and entrepreneurial mindset is key to solving the problems our companies and society face now and in the future. Innovators are everywhere and can add value from any role or department within their company, for example, C-suite leaders, facilities staff, IT administrators and human resource trainers. Innovators share common traits: they see emerging opportunities where others see hopeless problems, they solve problems with creative ideas, and they evaluate ideas for their merits and shortcomings.

This course is designed to teach the tools, strategies and mindset of an innovator to help students ideate, evaluate and innovate quickly. Students will collaborate using proven strategies and techniques to solve problems in new and unique ways.

Success in any facet of life requires a good plan … and any good plan defines your goal, tasks, resources, timeline and success factors, among other things. Defining (and executing) your plan in the context of solving a business problem is known as project management.

This course will help you understand the components that make up a good project management program and pitfalls to avoid, as well as tools and techniques to help ensure your project starts out on the right foot.

LinkedIn isn’t enough. Your digital presence is a reflection of who you are personally and professionally, which expands to many social venues online. Your goal is to show customers, strategic partners and stakeholders who you are with a focus on authenticity and transparency. We’ll cover content best practices and how your personal brand parallels your business’s digital presence.

Creating a business for the sake of generating profit is not enough. Businesses must contribute to the betterment of society through social, environmental and financial gains. This course will help you build the right vision for your business by engaging you in ongoing reflection and dialogue about your ethical responsibilities in product and service innovation, and helping you understand cognitive, behavioral and principled approaches to ethical issues in product and service innovation.

To be successful in your business venture, you need to make data-driven decisions. Much of that data can come from internal operations or perhaps secondary sources. But, to truly be successful, you need to gather, analyze and make decisions based on primary research data from your external market. In this course, you’ll learn the basic tenets of performing primary research including defining your market segment, building a primary research instrument, gathering data using a primary research instrument, analyzing the data and making recommendations.

Essential to most new business ventures is the ability to raise capital, initially from angel investors and then from venture capitalists (VCs). The capital-raising process usually starts with the “pitch”: a presentation that is compelling, exciting and informative. It also addresses what funds are required by the venture, how they will be used and how the investor will financially benefit from their investment.

This course will help you learn how to create the perfect pitch for your new business venture. We will review the elements of both successful and unsuccessful historical pitch presentations, plus elements of ones that you create before and during the class.

Accounting is critical to the success of every business—large or small, private or public. Even governments and nonprofits need accounting. In fact, accounting is so important that it’s often referred to as the “language of business.” This course will introduce you to that language, the process that accountants use to create records of a business’s operations and how that information is communicated to decision-makers, including you. An entrepreneur needs relevant, accurate and timely financial information in order to make the best decisions for their business, and you are the one person best suited to make this happen, especially early in the life of your business. Understanding this “language” will also help you become a better business partner to others, a better investor and a better consumer of business news.

Of the four major financial statements, the most important to a new business venture are the balance sheet, the income statement and the statement of cash flows. Knowing how to build and interpret these is critical to your success during not only the early stages of your business but throughout its entire lifetime. In this Sprint, based on a wide variety of financial transactions, you will learn how to build and interpret an income statement and a statement of cash flows. (It is assumed that you already know how to build and interpret a balance sheet.) You’ll also learn how to build a proforma income statement, based on the financial projections of your new business venture. 

Design thinking is a creative problem-solving process that builds your ability to first see and then solve human-centered opportunities. It starts with empathically looking at frustrations inside and around your organization, then moves through a variety of brainstorming sessions to build customer-centric solutions. Design thinking is a wonderful tool to help you monetize the human capital in your organization. Once you know the process, you’ll bring real challenges into the classroom, where you’ll use design thinking to build potential new products, services and solutions.

Market discovery is about identifying demand for ideas and innovations. Students will discover that some markets have already been established and others have yet to be created. Product market fit takes time. At first new ideas and innovations may not fit an existing market, requiring a new market to be developed.

We’ll study example companies in a wide variety of industries that over time found the correct product market fit. Students in this Sprint will learn methodologies to find and assess product market fit for new ideas and innovations.

What makes an amazing brand and how can you build one? How can customers find your brand if you’re a startup? How do you partner with your customer to create your brand? We will walk through the process of developing an amazing brand experience using search engine optimization and customer journey mapping while developing real brand depth—step by step.

Welcome to the cloud! But wait — what is the cloud? Is it a thing? A concept? If you are starting a new business (or thinking about it) or improving efficiencies in an existing one, you need to understand the technologies and tools available in the cloud.

The cloud has dramatically changed the competitive landscape for startups by reducing the cost of starting a new business. The cloud removes expensive equipment, software and support expenditures; with the cloud, you pay for what you use. This course will focus on identifying, analyzing and implementing cloud technologies to help run your business. Topics include the cloud’s flexible costs, how and when to implement cloud-based tools, data safety, comparing services and improving collaboration.

Additionally, we will tackle some common questions related to the cloud: Where do I host my website? How do I handle accounting? Where is the email server? How do I track customers? How do I share information? What tools are available for customer support? These are just a few issues the cloud can solve efficiently and cost-effectively. 

All businesses have assets—both tangible and intangible—that must be managed, nurtured, accounted for and protected. Among the most important of those assets fall in the realm of intellectual property (IP) and are protected through mechanisms such as copyrights, trademarks and patents. As a business owner, you must be aggressive and vigilant in ensuring that your most important IP assets are protected, as they are an important part of your brand portfolio. This Sprint will introduce you to the role of copyrights, trademarks and patents as tools for protecting your IP. In doing so, you will learn about your rights as an IP owner and, equally as important, your responsibilities for not infringing on the IP assets of other organizations. 

Starting a business involves a host of tasks—from product and service development to marketing and sales—and at the foundation of all these activities are legal considerations. To get your business off on the right foot, this course introduces you to the legal concerns that are vitally important to your success. Legal considerations for startups include establishing a form of business operation, registering with the government, obtaining the appropriate licenses, filing sales taxes, hiring and managing employees and a plethora of other essential activities.

Being able to tell a compelling story, in particular with data, is a skill that is rarely taught. Today, most people either adopt reports that have existed in an organization for a long time, or they create flashy reports using the latest tools. In most cases, neither of these reports give the end users what they want.

This course will focus on giving you the tools to create purposeful reports by helping you learn age-old design principles: form, fit and function.

The purpose of this Sprint is to empower you to more effectively develop your creative and entrepreneurial capacities through the tools of rapid prototyping. You will identify appropriate rapid prototyping technologies to apply to unique situations. This Sprint’s curriculum progressively builds by presenting more challenging problems. At the end of the course, you will be able to turn ideas into solutions that add value to a product, process or service.

If you are starting a new business or thinking about starting a new business, you need to understand the technologies and tools available to help you build and manage a website. But where do you host a website? And how do you create and update that website? These are just a few questions we will answer in the WordPress Sprint.

Designed from a beginner’s perspective, this Sprint provides a step-by-step tutorial for creating and publishing a website via WordPress. We will cover the conceptual framework of open source and content management systems (CMS) before leading into the fundamentals and tools required to build and maintain a WordPress website. At end of this course, you will be able to develop, publish and manage your own WordPress website. 

If you have ever walked into a retail store or shopped online and wondered what it would take to create the experience yourself—including setting up the store, purchasing inventory, setting prices and deciding the layout—or just wondered how it all came together to become a viable business, then this Sprint is for you. This Sprint is also applicable if you are in the process of manufacturing a product or would like to know what goes into the supply chain to create and price your product. You will learn what to consider when choosing a distribution method to get your product to market. This Sprint has been designed from a new entrepreneur’s perspective, helping you to understand the steps and process for marketing, pricing and selling. It is great for students who want to create a product or students developing a retail store that sells products manufactured by a third party or developed in-house. 

Did you know emotional and social skills are four times more important than IQ when considering success and prestige in professional settings? Emotional intelligence (EI) can be confusing. What does it mean? Is it fluffy stuff or something tangible? Now more than ever, employers and clients are seeking leaders who display emotionally intelligent thinking, decision-making and actions. How do you know if you meet those requirements? Until recently, EI was a “gut assessment” of someone’s ability to control their emotions or to care about someone or something. Now, we have a valid and reliable way of understanding our own emotional intelligence as well as that of others. We can even measure the EI of teams, but still, EI is quite complex.

EI is a talent that, unlike IQ, can be learned and improved throughout one’s life. Research has distinguished 12 components of EI including self-regard, self-actualization, self-awareness, emotional expression, assertiveness, independence, interpersonal relationships, empathy, social responsibility, problem solving, reality testing, impulse control, flexibility, stress tolerance and optimism. Want to know how you score in these areas? In the Emotionally Effective Leader Sprint, you will have the opportunity to assess your own EI through a valid and reliable EI talent assessment. Revealing your strengths and weaknesses, you’ll learn how to build your own EI and maximize the magnitude of your impact within the organizations or teams you lead. 

Would you date a person you don’t know? Much like finding the right partner, developing lasting relationships with customers requires time and energy upfront. You need to get to know your customers and what they value before they will make a commitment to your brand. For example, Peloton’s 2019 ad campaign “The Gift That Gives Back” was designed to highlight the benefits of a customer’s fitness journey. However, it received criticism in the media for being offensive. In the end, the negative publicity seemed to help strengthen the brand. Why? Perhaps it’s because Peloton paid close attention to what their customers care about. Peloton customers value fitness and well-being and the discourse in the media highlighted how Peloton could support their journeys. This course will introduce you to tools and data sources that can help with segmenting and targeting, developing customer personas and mapping out customer journeys to better understand the customer experience

Sales is all about getting a person to make a purchase. Each business needs a unique step-by-step sales process that aligns with the buyer’s journey.  We will discuss the key aspects of the top, middle and bottom of a sales process:  We’ll learn the key metrics and activities, both human and digital, for sales teams in today’s modern world. We’ll learn about lead generation, prospecting, lead nurturing, deal qualification, designing a sales process, sales pipeline, forecasting, managing customer relationships, negotiating and converting leads to clients.

Essential to most business ventures is the ability to raise capital to fuel growth. If you’re starting a business the capital comes from friends, family, angel investors, venture capitalists (VCs) and hard work. The capital raising process requires a degree of thoughtful planning, rapid execution, and unforeseen pivots and audibles along the way. If executed properly, it allows you to run your business!

This course will help you learn how to identify the best funding options (bootstrap, loans, credit cards, investors…) for your business. 

Success in any business venture is often predicated on the strength of collaboration in and between high-performing teams. But teams also come with their own unique set of challenges that can often hinder group productivity and cause friction, such as interpersonal issues, ambiguous goals and objectives, and competing agendas. There are techniques that team and group leaders can use to alleviate those challenges in the current era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. 

The High-Performing Teams class is for students who are eager to build their capacity to connect as leaders more effectively and learn to leverage psychological safety to create cultures of connection where risk-taking leads to team success. Together we’ll explore how you can implement the latest trends in remote and hybrid team management in a post-COVID era as well as how to incorporate the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) to improve team performance and cohesion.

Essential to a successful business venture is the ability to design and create a brand that resonates with customers. In this course, students will learn the brand design process, review the elements of both successful and unsuccessful brand campaigns, and critique brand concepts to improve their aesthetic sensibilities.

This course will help students learn to use the latest digital technologies to create a brand style guide, and for their final project, students will use the tools to develop a style guide for a new or existing business.

Every business has competitors, from large corporations to “main street” businesses and start-ups. They all compete for customers and market-share. Even the University of Denver competes for students.

How to Identify, Evaluate & Beat Your Competition is for people who like to win and don’t like to lose. In this class, you’ll study strategic frameworks and tools that you can use to identify, understand and dissect your competitors and the levers that you can pull to beat them (like price, quality, service). We’ll identify and discuss front-line tactics you can use to outwork your competition.

We’ll explore and discuss real life cases and personal stories from various industries to illustrate the key concepts used by professionals in competitive analysis and strategy. You’ll apply these concepts during the breakout sessions, where we’ll take on the media and entertainment industry.

Social entrepreneurship is simply applying entrepreneurship principles to societal challenges. This can be for profit, nonprofit, social business or even not an official organization at all. The consistency across all these is the desire to make society better.

Finding a problem that gives you purpose is a challenge in itself, as you cannot simply think about it. You need to create a life that allows you the freedom to find this purpose, and then successfully devote yourself to this purpose. In addition, if your goal is to make society better, you want to avoid the trap of working on one problem while actively contributing to others. So the ideal social entrepreneur creates an organization and life that offer a net improvement to society. This involves learning to “socially” manage others, environmental impact, finances, etc.

The Social Entrepreneurship course is for people that are eager to improve the world. We’ll incorporate concepts from finance, management, psychology and even neurobiology. You’ll learn how to find the problem you wish to work on, and how to be more successful in addressing that problem.

Every day, and sometimes multiple times a day, we persuade and negotiate with people such as funders, classmates, friends, family members, potential employers, merchants and coworkers. However, most of us know little about what it takes to be effective negotiators. This class teaches you proven methods to support your desire to reach principled agreements by broadening your basic negotiation skills. We will learn theory-driven negotiation skills, engage in simulated negotiations and make concrete plans to conduct a future negotiation.

For many people creating and evaluating business budgets and forecasts is intimidating. This applied course is designed to demystify the subject as students study, create and evaluate budgets and forecasts.

This course will provide students tools as they create an entrepreneurial budget and forecast. In addition, you’ll learn about metrics that entrepreneurs, investors and banks use to evaluate these financial materials. Along the way we’ll consider budgets for different types of businesses, including B2B, B2C, products, subscriptions and services.

We’ll cover budget topics such as unit economics, breakeven, margin analysis, customer acquisition cost and marketing efficiency, plus forecast topics like burn rates, scaling, margin creep and north star metrics. Plus, we’ll touch on the basics of valuation and how budget materials relate to valuation.

Amazon has become the de facto tool for selling Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) online. If you’re not selling your product on Amazon, chances are that someone else is already doing it for you. Unlike real estate, Amazon squatters may have (and, retain) first-mover advantages in selling products and securing organic listing authority.

Anyone planning to sell products for themselves or for an employer needs to understand the Amazon landscape. Amazon has become a ubiquitous metaverse for commerce. Everything known tangibly in bricks-and-mortar retail has a virtual analogue expected to move faster and cheaper, all while subject to the scrutiny of customer reviews. The Amazon eco-system includes an army of gig workers and service providers such as lawyers and marketing professionals, subject to the same constraints.

Whether you wish to become a third-party seller on Amazon or plan to work for a CPG company, understanding the power of Amazon (and related tools) has universal application. We plan to cover the risks of entering Amazon, the criteria to evaluate successful products, protecting your brand, organic and pay-per click strategies, third-party tools, and the broad market for trading in Amazon businesses.

Want to learn how to make a difference in the world using Sustainability? This course is designed to give you the entrepreneurial skills to incorporate sustainability into a company’s products, services, and day to day operations. If you want to learn how to innovate and develop sustainability initiatives that make massive societal and environmental impacts while tackling current challenges like climate change, water scarcity, equity & inclusion, this course is for you.

This course provides an essential overview of the challenges that our planet and society are facing and provides you the tools you’ll need to ignite your sustainable business vision and bring it to reality. If you have a passion for making a positive impact in the world and an entrepreneurial idea for a new business or a product or business solution within an existing company, come join us! Students will walk away with a working knowledge of sustainability issues and the tools to build sustainable programs into new and existing business ventures that address both a societal and market need.

At the end of this sprint course, students should feel empowered with the ability to incorporate sustainable thinking into whatever their future careers hold – whether that be an entrepreneurial venture, the development of a new product, or helping businesses drive business value through sustainability.

Building a meaningful life doesn’t just happen – it happens on purpose. In this Life Design for Entrepreneurs sprint you will approach the challenge of designing your life as an entrepreneur the way a designer would – through empathy, experimentation, wayfinding, prototyping, and action planning. You will participate in highly interactive workshops tailored specifically for entrepreneurs, explore the social and personal narratives that shape your perspectives, and practice ways to reframe problems. A key outcome of this sprint is your design of three possible future paths as an entrepreneur – Odyssey Plans – for your life and career ahead. You will develop tangible ways to move forward and leave with an action plan with accountability. Through hands-on exercises, small group discussions, collaborative ideation, and personal reflection, this course will support the application of design thinking concepts, tools, and practices – all geared to empower self-discovery and design of your career and life as an entrepreneur.

Whether you are a visual artist, musician, dancer, or other member of the arts community, entrepreneurial capabilities will be crucial for monetizing your artistic mission and interests. In this class, we will explore how to find gigs, successfully manage your arts-focused endeavors as a profitable business, negotiate compensation, and channel a range of experiences into career development. In addition to ensuring this foundational knowledge, we will go beyond entrepreneurial basics to help you develop the tools to support your artistic and entrepreneurial endeavors. We will bridge the gap between artistic and business training to provide an expanded perspective on arts entrepreneurship. This Sprint has asynchronous work that is available 2-weeks prior to the in-person class. The asynchronous work, up to 40% of the total work for the class, is required to be completed prior to the in-person class. There is a post class project that is due two weeks after the in-person class

Anyone with a phone and an Internet connection can “shoot” and upload a video to a variety of social media platforms (Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, etc). Yet, many of these videos are overlooked due to their poor production, amateurish editing, and lack of a promotion plan. This “Sprint” is designed to introduce you to the world of professional phone videography and editing.

Topics covered will include: getting the most out of your phone’s camera (software and techniques), useful accessories for your phone camera, recording professional audio on your phone, editing video on your phone and connecting your phone to a larger editing system. Strategies for producing product videos, pitch videos, branded content, and entertainment focused media will be discussed. When you complete this course, you will be able to produce highly spreadable and professional looking videos with little more than your phone camera.