Hello, I'm Tom Mierzwa. I'm the instructor for this course, and welcome to Crafting Innovation Strategies for Corporate Entrepreneurship. What you're going to learn in this course is that we're going to grow your ability to recognize where an internal venture. That really is something that's inside of a company. Where it has the potential for improving the company. And you can understand how an internal venture is put together, how it's put together in terms of roles and structure. And you'll also learn the ways to overcome resistance, as often happens in many internal ventures in companies. Companies have their own operations, they have their own cultures, they have their own organizational sets. And many of these, often, are things that run counter to an internal corporate venture. And then finally, what you'll learn are series of strategies that can help you launch your internal venture. So these are the basic fundamentals that we're really helping you to learn in this course. And why are these topics important? Well they're important for employees. And employees are people who have ideas, they have creative ideas that are important for their company. And these people, you may be one of them, you may be an employee. You have an idea that you like to do something with. And what we want to try to do in this course is equip you with the idea of being able to, let's start this one again. Why are these topics important for you? Well, if you're an employee and you have a creative idea that's important for you company. It's going to be helpful for you to be empowered, to understand how an internal venture is created and can be created in your own company. And if you're a manager and you're attempting to put together a team of creative people and resources that will support the internal venture. You're going to want to know how to do that. And if you're a technical specialist this will take you out of the realm of technology completely. And really put you into a situation where you'll see what is like to assemble a project that is really an entrepreneurial venture inside of a company. And then if you're a consultant and you happen to advise companies on ways to launch an internal venture. What you can do from this course is really learn how the pieces all fit together. So that you can be a more effective consultant, a more effective advisor, a more effective helper to other companies. So the best ways to learn in this class and other classes that I've taught, in Coursera and other places. Is to be active in this class every day. By being active every day, you keep a sense of momentum. You keep a sense of involvement. You keep a sense of focus. And if you have an opinion about a topic and you express it every day you're going to get feedback. You're going to get interaction from other people in the class. You are going to get interaction from me as the instructor. And that will keep you on your toes and will keep you alert to ways in which you can learn. And so that's important. And another way to learn is to. And really a second way is to explore the web for blogs. Innovation blogs, innovation newsletters, innovation articles, innovation videos and innovation podcasts. These are all about innovation. But very often you're going to find they're not going to be a specific answer to a specific question that you may have. But there are going to be pieces to the puzzle. And if you begin to recognize that this course is much like a puzzle. And if you can begin to see that there are places you can plug in resources that have answers to the questions that you think are part of the puzzle. You can help yourself. And then finally another way to learn is to understand how an internal venture is really put together. And how innovation is a key part to that internal venture. So here's how we are going to operate every module. And in this case it's going to be every week but, each module of the course is comprised of a series of video lectures. And there are usually about a half a dozen. And you can go through them right from beginning and I would recommend that. And then these lecture topics also have resources and lecture topics will trigger some discussion among class members. And at the end of each module, a short assignment will help you formulate your understanding of internal ventures. And will capture every piece of key learning that you will have been exposed to in that module.
