MSING030: New Venture Analytics

Lecturer: Dr. Dave Chapman

Aims

Important business decisions cannot be left to intuition alone. In the face of considerable uncertainty and risks entrepreneurs must provide analytical support for their forecasts of future growth. 

The aim of this module is to enable nascent entrepreneurs to gather and assess evidence, communicate the structure of their business reasoning, defend it to adversarial challenges and demonstrate that they have done a thorough and robust analysis. 

Students will be equipped with knowledge and skills in the areas of data analysis, structuring decisions, building decision models, risk assessment, and decision making under uncertainty, and gain an understanding of the following issues:

  • What makes a good decision?
  • What is the role of intuition and analysis in decision-making?
  • How can we determine the key information for decision-making?

Objectives

The module introduces analytical tools and techniques appropriate to effective decision-making in a new venture context. These include methods for:

• Framing decisions

• Risk Analysis

• Scenario Analysis

• Sensitivity Analysis

• Simulation Analysis

• Decision Analysis

• Building decision models and decision support tools

Teaching methods include lectures, case-based teaching, videos, and simulations. The module will also make extensive use of software packages appropriate to the implementation of decision support tools.

Texts

Management Science Modeling (Albright and Winston, 2009, 3rd Edition).

Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise (Dorf & Byers, 2010. 3rd Edition)