We have all unknowingly adsorbed business startup mythologies in our culture as fact – like the viability of starting in a garage or basement, starting small, and with little capital, as well as whatever clickbait faux news (“Young Billionaires!”) we read in the newest online forum dedicated to start-up culture. These success stories are all wrong, or “upside /down”, for the 21^st Century.  There are, alternatively, new generative enterprise models that construct their viability in the context of contemporary global trade and commodity interdependencies, while embedding social equity and sustainable communities into their core function.  That is where we will go.

Our dialogue in this course will begin with a conversation about “business and place”: where we are now (in the early 21^stCentury, global economy), where we have been (the second half of 20th Century), how we came to misperceive our current economic and socio-cultural conditions, how we got to “upside/down”, and how that evolution in enterprise affects the creation of viable enterprise today.  Subsequently, we will focus on building tangible, substantive knowledge and skillsets germane to establishing viable, societally-responsive, enterprise, from working with a business model canvas (Osterwald & Pigneur), to exploring types of capital and the critical role of adequate capitalization in offsetting risk, to defining value propositions and identifying key partners, to embedding socio-economic equity in enterprise function, to creating a viable launch plan.