Five great online courses for start-ups

Getting the skills and knowledge needed to run a business no longer requires that you take time away from your entrepreneurial activities to study at university.

A growing range of online courses are now available to start-ups, enabling entrepreneurs to build businesses while they learn.

Best of all, many of them are free – this week, Melbourne University struck a deal with US company Coursera to provide a range of online courses.

So which of the courses on offer are most useful to start-ups? We’ve picked out four of Coursera’s best subjects for early-stage ventures, as well as a further course from Stanford University.

To check out an overview of each course, click on the tabs below:

1. Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies

Dr James V. Green

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For budding start-ups, this course hits the sweet spot. It covers the important steps in identifying great ideas and how to commercialise them.

Creating a winning business plan and raising funding is also part of the course, which sets out two core skills it hopes participants will learn: how to use a business model approach to analyse each part of a company, and, secondly, how to use a customer development orientation to see if anyone really wants the product.

The course, run by a University of Maryland academic, will run for five to seven weeks and include quiz questions in the videos.