THE DISCOURSE | Startingup

MARKET: HOW TO CONVINCE WITH VALUE

The entrepreneur's discourse

Now you are able to communicate your project. You may construct a concise discourse which communicates the value of your product or service.

TASK 1. In this task you will have to prepare, as a team, the first version of your entrepreneur's discourse, using a very well-defined model for the purpose.

The template “Key questions for the entrepreneur's discourse” consists of a series of questions that you must answer sequentially. It is very important to emphasise the need not to change the order of the sections. That does not mean that you cannot give your presentations a personal touch, but it is essential to retain the general structure proposed, in order to maintain the coherence of the discourse.

Even though it is a mechanism for oral communication, you must put each new version of the discourse in writing. The only way to improve a discourse is to write it, internalise it, give it, listen to comments and revise it, taking the comments into account to write a new discourse and start again. It should, therefore, be possible to record on paper both the discourse itself and the comments of the audience. For that purpose, a template is provided for writing the discourse on. it can be used as the initial version for the validation process, which will be carried out as part of the fieldwork (“Initial version of the entrepreneur's discourse”).

Preparation for the process of repeating the entrepreneur's discourse. You will also have to test and improve it by using systematic validation with different audiences. The way to improve a discourse of this kind is to give it to different kinds of people, taking note of their comments, both positive and negative, and making changes according to those comments in order to validate a new version. It is ideal to carry out this process various times to systematically polish and improve both the content and the form of the presentation. You will have to use the sheet “Assessment of the discourse” to do so. It is important for the audience to be as specific as possible with their comments. “I like it,”, “I don’t understand”, “It’s fine”, “It’s interesting”, etc. do not help to improve the discourse.

You will have to write a new version of the discourse including the changes.

The final length will be determined by the maximum time of three minutes. It is important for the length to be monitored.

TASK 2: FINAL PRESENTATION

Your team will have to present your entrepreneur's talk, to show your product, prototype or service to obtain investors. The prototypes may be used to facilitate the discourse and the assessment of the different projects. You will have three minutes and all the members of the group should participate.

Your presentation is totally free and you can use the one that you have prepared along the previous tasks or use a new one. You can have a look at the rubric according to the one you will be assess.

After each presentation and in teams, you should note down your impressions, as it may later be difficult to remember all the presentations and their strong and weak points. Your team will have an assessment template to assess positive and negative aspects of the discourse and of the product or service itself.

Scoring: each group must award between 1 (bad) and 4 (good) points for both the assessment of the talk and of the product or service. You will have to justify your points and comment them as a group. Write everything down on the assessment template.

Dynamic: all groups will talk first and once all of them have finished, each group will have to invest their money on those projects or services that most interested them. To do so, your team will have to be together to discuss about your investment. Once you have decided in which group your team is going to invest, the communicator will give the groups the money.

Investment rules

Each group will have € 15,000 to invest.
It will be possible to invest in a maximum of 5 projects.
There is no minimum investment.
Each group will have to establish what is their minimum to be able to carry out the project.
Each group will receive 15 notes of 1,000 €.
The choice of each investment must be justified.

The teacher will collect the assessment templates once the assessment process has been completed by all teams. The teacher will communicate the results and announce which groups have received the most amount of money from the investors. They will see if the projects are viable or not and will communicate the winning teams.

As this is the final session of a module and to finalise the communication material for each project definitively, the final outcome template must be completed. It will involve reflecting the entrepreneur's discourse in a template with the name “Value proposition”.