Reflecting on the Entrepreneurship for Emerging Markets short course

Wow, where to begin. I knew I would learn a lot from this course but to be honest I didn’t realise how much. I am so grateful for all the information that has cleared up questions and informed me during these six weeks. I feel like I am far better prepared for taking on this startup than I was before. I feel far more confident with the topics we have covered during these six weeks as well.

I found module 3 — problems and opportunities the most significant section of this course because it may be easy to find problems in what we are doing but finding the opportunities in the problem is where the skills lie. Like I mentioned in my module 3 blog post I particularly liked the story about the milkshake fast food take away and how each person that bought one had a different reason for buying the milkshake, depending on whether they were on the way to work in the traffic, giving their kids something to drink to keep them satisfied or just buying a milkshake to fill a need for something sweet. Clayton Christiansen, looked at what job does the customer hire the product to do. I found this a very straightforward way of working out what opportunities a product can give to someone who is buying it. I have even considered buying his book to find out more tricks of how he sees a customer or consumer wanting or needing a product. Why else would someone buy your product if they can’t use it? I know I wouldn’t buy something unless it had a function in my life.

I particularly enjoyed the assignment where we had to give advice to a company on how not fail. I decided to write the letter to myself as the founder of Little Grey Wolf and I found the experience far more interesting because I was making it relative to my life and business. I thought of aspects of the business that could go wrong and how to detect them before they happen or how it would apply or not apply to me because of the nature of the business.

I thoroughly enjoyed this course, how it was presented and how it pushed me to learn so much in such a short space of time. I would recommend it to anyone keen to start a business or just to gain knowledge on the topic.