Start Your Own Business: Creativity, Innovation and Research

Discover creative solutions to improve your small business idea

Creativity and innovation can be applied to all businesses to help you develop a more competitive venture.

On this two-week course, you’ll discover tools you can use to apply creativity and innovation to your business idea to improve its chances of success. Through the guidance of business experts from The Open University, you’ll uncover the steps you can take to effectively compete with your competitors and make your product or service more appealing to customers.

Explore how to approach creativity in business

You’ll learn how to find creative solutions that address the challenges of establishing a new business. Taking a methodical approach, you’ll understand how to justify and express your ideas to stakeholders who question the effectiveness of your ideas.

Improve your information gathering skills to understand your business sector

Being well informed about your sector and industry is the cheapest way to avoid costly business mistakes. You’ll learn about some low cost and easy methods to build this knowledge.

You’ll discover how to find relevant information, make sense of it, and put it in your business plan to help convince stakeholders that your ideas will work. You’ll also learn how to use interviews, surveys and other methods to gather useful data.

Unlock opportunities for your business through effective networking

Leveraging and expanding your current personal network can play a key role in the success of your business. To maximise this, you’ll learn strategies to analyse your personal network, enhance your network size and scope, and how you can engineer crucial opportunities for your business.