Entrepreneurship Skills Lab

The Entrepreneurship Skills Lab encourages Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) students, faculty, staff, alumni and affiliates to engage in meaningful workshops with subject matter experts from diverse backgrounds to learn new entrepreneurial skills. The series highlights experts from a range of disciplines and industries for a one hour workshop. 

These workshops are for anyone who wants to skill up and learn something new. Regularly offered workshops include: Business Research Resources, Value Proposition, Customer Discovery, Content Marketing, Financial Forecasting and more! 

All workshops are free and open to the public. At the moment, the Skills Lab is virtual and is broadcast over Zoom and LinkedIn Live.

See past events on our Youtube playlist. Sign up for upcoming events on StartupTree or Facebook.

If you have an idea for a future workshop that you would like to host or have an idea for workshop topics you would like to see, please email vealeinstitute@case.edu

Foundational Workshops (offered every fall and spring):

Pricing, Balance Sheets, and Cash Flow

This workshop covers basic financial knowledge needed in starting and operating a startup. It aims to equip entrepreneurs with the financial knowledge needed to talk to professionals with confidence.

Financial Forecasting

In this workshop, participants walk away with an understanding of what financial forecasting is, how to create financial forecasts, and how to best utilize them for one’s business or startup.

Getting Funded: Best Practices to Attracting Investor Interest & Understanding Start-Up Funding Sources

This workshop provides a high level overview of various aspects of small business and start-up fundraising activities. These include small business lending and alternative financing sources, venture capital, angel investment, crowd-funding, as well as funding efforts through the SEC Regulation D Rule 506(b).

Marketing Analytics

This workshop discusses how to leverage the sea of analytics the right way for organizational success.

Content Marketing

This workshop discusses the growing role of content in successful marketing programs. Content plays an important role in today’s marketing for B2C and B2B companies alike and it requires a definitive strategy and plan to be successful.

Intellectual Property

This workshop dives into the differences between patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets, how those rights are obtained, and what due diligence needs to be done with respect to those rights.

Company Formation

This workshop covers the nuts and bolts of company formation, giving aspiring entrepreneurs the tips needed for setting up a business entity

Pitching

This workshop discusses ways to create and perfect your pitch in order to share what you can offer to potential investors as effectively and succinctly as possible.

Business Models

This workshop focuses on the rationale of how organizations create, deliver and implement business models, which are valuable tools for planning and validation.

Customer Discovery

In this workshop, participants learn how to correctly do “customer discovery” in order to create a solution to a problem that customers will want and pay for.

Value Proposition

This workshop discusses the key components of how to create value for a potential customer and design experiments to efficiently validate (or invalidate) whether an idea is actually something that people will pay for.

Tax, Business and Accounting Issues for Startups

This workshop teaches practical tax, accounting and business considerations that startups face in their first few years of operation.

Business Research Resources

This workshop teaches how to find the fastest way to login to Case-licensed databases, with the best Case "landing page" for starting all your research – a clean, easy to use page for any research you'll need to do.

Rock Your LinkedIn Profile

This workshop is for people who have a LinkedIn account they would like to improve and those who are making an account for the first time. By the end, it is understood how to make your profile stand out and other LinkedIn tips and tricks.