A live entrepreneurial project that explores the key challenges of introducing products and services to market

The Entrepreneurial Journey is a team-based venture start-up programme. You will take an idea for a new product or service, develop a value proposition, carry out customer discovery research, validate the product or service, and create a fully-fledged business proposition. At the end of your journey, you will pitch to a panel of investors, and compete for a monetary prize.

The module is highly practical and organized around workshops and coaching sessions, helping you to progress your project over a period of six months. Building on your core teaching in the Design Thinking and Innovative Problem Solving, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship modules, this project will help you apply what you have learned on the MBA so far to an entrepreneurial venture that could actually become a real business at the end.

Whether you are an inspiring entrepreneur or want to find out if the entrepreneurial life is for you, the Entrepreneurial Journey is a safe space to explore a novel business opportunity in a practical environment.

Collaborating for success

You can either work on your idea, or otherwise you will be able to collaborate with others on developing ideas. A key feature of the Entrepreneurial Journey is that you are able to team up with tech students or post-docs from around the College, design students from the Royal College of Art or indeed Imperial academic entrepreneurs via Imperial Innovations. Operating as part of a self-selected, multi-disciplinary team, in this way you can explore the commercial feasibility of ideas based on the latest developments in science, technology, medicine and design.

A great opportunity to practice your teamwork skills, this project will meld everyone’s skillsets together and allow you to showcase your areas of expertise. There will be plenty of support available for your project, including an ideas marketplace event, a design thinking workshop, a lean innovation workshop, idea surgeries, coaching sessions with your entrepreneurship professor, and a practice pitch event. The Journey is provided by the business school in close collaboration with the Imperial Enterprise Lab.

Pitching to the experts

The project culminates with a live pitch of your business case to an expert panel of venture capitalists and compete for a monetary prize. By the end of this highly experiential journey, you will have explored the process of preparing a start-up and will be able to exploit the power of design and innovation to transform ideas into a new product or service.

If your completed project presents a realistic investment, you may have the opportunity to take part in the Imperial Business Pitch competition. Participants present business cases to a panel of investors, IP experts, industry innovation managers and entrepreneurs to compete for seed capital.

This project is offered as one of two projects that focus on building your teamwork skills; you may alternatively choose the Group Consulting Project instead.