Introduction and guidance
This free badged course, Entrepreneurship – from ideas to reality, lasts 24 hours, with 8 ‘sessions’. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete a further study session.
The course has been designed to help you in starting up and running your own business. Using case studies it will take your through the decisions from generating initial ideas through to deciding what you will do and how to establish your business and grow it.
You will be guided through business models, funding options, business types, the influence of location and importantly assessment of your own skills, values and attitudes to risk. You will receive practical advice from real entrepreneurs and will also be signposted towards additional support which can help you develop your own capabilities further.
There will be numerous opportunities to check your learning. This includes interactive quizzes, of which Weeks 4 and 8 will provide you with an opportunity to earn a badge to demonstrate your new skills. You can read more on how to study the course and about badges in the next sections.
After completing this course, you will be able to:
- identify strengths of an entrepreneur and what support is needed to run a business
- evaluate, develop and refine a business idea and create a business model
- identify the gaps in resources and capabilities needed to grow a new business
- create a plan to develop capability and make progress growing a business
- create a pitch to gain support for development of a business.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next session. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course.
It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.
Get careers guidance
This course has been included in the National Careers Service [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] to help you develop new skills.
The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.