Entrepreneurship

Objectives: This course is designed to promote entrepreneurial spirit and outlook among students, encouraging them to think critically, identify opportunities, and transform their ideas into successful ventures. It aims at imparting them with the requisite knowledge, skills, abilities, enabling them to seize the identified opportunities for initiating ventures and successful navigating the challenges that come with starting a business and managing it. The course covers topics relevant to entrepreneurship including setting up and initiation of business, market research, opportunity identification, business planning, financial literacy for managing finances and securing funding, marketing and sales, team building and innovation.

Contents: 1. Introduction to Entrepreneurship: - Definition and concept of entrepreneurship. - Why to become an entrepreneur? - Entrepreneurial process. - Role of entrepreneurship in economic development. 2. Entrepreneurial Skills: - Characteristics and qualities of successful entrepreneurs (including stories of successes and failures). - Areas of essential entrepreneurial skill and ability such as creative and critical thinking, innovation and risk taking abilities etc. 3. Opportunity Recognition and Idea Generation: - Opportunity identification, evaluation and exploitation. - Innovative idea generation techniques for entrepreneurial ventures. 4. Marketing and Sales: - Target market identification and segmentation. - Four P's of Marketing. - Developing a marketing strategy. - Branding. 5. Financial Literacy: - Basic concepts of income, savings and investments. - Basic concepts of assets, liabilities and equity. - Basic concepts of revenue and expenses. - Overview of cash-flows. - Overview of banking products including Islamic modes of financing. - Sources of funding for startups (angel financing, debt financing, equity financing etc.). 6. Team Building for Startups: - Characteristics and features of effective teams. - Team building and effective leadership for startups. 7. Regulatory Requirements to Establish Enterprises in Pakistan: - Types of enterprises (e.g., sole proprietorship, partnership, private limited companies etc.). - Intellectual property rights and protection. - Regulatory requirements to register an enterprise in Pakistan, with special emphasis on export firms. - Taxation and financial reporting obligation.