The second module of MS in Innovations and Entrepreneurship began with a visit to the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe where the participants spent the whole day with Shauna Tonkin, a lecturer/ administrator at Regent University and Director of Education at the Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor. The focus of the class was on business ethics. “If you want to transmit the values of your business to others, you should reflect on your personal value system first. If we cannot understand ourselves, how can we contribute to our business? Our values are based on our previous experience,” emphasized Shauna.
These words of hers were confirmed by Mark Zarkhin, the founder of Kumpel Group and Pizza Celentano chain, “The formula for success does exist, and it lies in one’s value system. Any business is about emotions that its underlying values evoke. The values of the owner, administrator, or sales person may differ. Thus it’s important to build up a proper value system that will not lose its value at any stage. Company or product marketing is also about emotions. The brighter emotions you will evoke in the beginning, the faster your customer will make a purchase decision as such decisions are often spontaneous.”
The next day started off with a class in Macroeconomics with Yaroslav Prytula. “We cannot increase our savings all the time. From the viewpoint of macroeconomics, saving doesn’t do any good to economy. The global population capable of paying is shrinking. Therefore, at present the focus should not be on growing, but rather on not falling down and losing what you already have. That’s in the long term, of course. In the short term, it makes sense to save and invest,” said the Director of the UCU Program in Computer Science.
As part of this module, the participants also had a unique opportunity to meet with Burton Lee, Silicon Valley’s expert on innovation and entrepreneurship and lecturer at Stanford University, who gave a master class “Business Design and Innovations”. Here are his key statements that he supported with cases of global companies, “Company culture is the core innovation platform. Quality is extremely important. Understand the end-to-end customer experience.”
Click the link to view Burton Lee’s presentation
The module culminated with a course in Blue Ocean Strategy with Serhiy Gvozdiov, partner at the Inspira Strategy Institute and managing partner of the company Neobkhidno & Dostatno (Necessarily and Sufficiently). In the end, the participants had some practical assignments related to measuring the time value of money and managing personal finances.
In general, the module was full of new and fresh ideas that the participants projected onto their own experience and translated into their own business ideas. “If you want to understand the market, macroeconomics, and strategy, you should have a very good understanding of human psychology in the first place as any business is based on people,” the participants put it briefly and nicely.
