How to Conduct Market Identification to Validate your Product’s Value Proposition

CUHK Business School Youth Online Courses offer university students and recent university graduates of any academic background in anywhere to meet and learn with university students across the globe.

Key Benefits

• Certificate of Completion
• Designed and taught by CUHK faculty and seasoned business practitioners
• Small class sizes and taught synchronously (real-time) to ensure extensive interaction with instructor and peers around the world
• Two timeslots of each course are available

A research in the USA in 2019 (CB Insight) showed that 42% of start-up businesses failed because there is “no market need” for their products.  It becomes the critical success factors for businesses, therefore, be they start-ups or even established companies, to identify the market of their products, validate their value proposition, and find out the market needs correctly, because failing to do so, everything thereafter (such as product plan, marketing plan, operations plan, and financial plan etc.) will be wrong.

This course uses the “6Ws Approach” developed by the course lecturer, to conduct market identification and test/validate your value proposition, which leads to designing the product to meet the market needs.  Success and failure cases will be used as illustrations.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of these topics, you should be able to:

1. Identify correctly the market of your product
2. Improve the product specifications as required to meet the market needs
3. Formulate a marketing strategy

Certificate of Completion

Certificate of Completion will be issued by the Asia-Pacific Institute of Business, The Chinese University of Hong Kong to those who attained at least 80% attendance rate, and fulfilled online course assignment.

Target Participants

• Founders/would-be founders of start-ups wanting to launch new products
• New Product Development Managers wanting to launch new products
• Product Managers wanting to rectify poor-performing products or expand market coverage of existing products

Eligibility

• Current undergraduate/postgraduate students or recent university graduates
• Competent in English (the course will be taught in English with interactive discussion throughout the lectures)
• No pre-requisites

Content

Assignment

Video-based group presentation.

APPLY NOW

Duration : 4 hours in 2 weeks

Programme Dates:
17 Oct 2020 (Sat) & 24 Oct 2020 (Sat)

Venue: CUHK eLearning Platform

Programme Fee: 
HK$1,125 (USD 145)

Course Date & Time (UTC/GMT +8 hours):
Class A:
09:30-11:30, 17 Oct 2020 (Sat) &
09:30-11:30, 24 Oct 2020 (Sat)

Class B:
16:00-18:00, 17 Oct 2020 (Sat) &
16:00-18:00, 24 Oct 2020 (Sat)

Application Deadline: 20 September 2020
(Places are limited and on a first-come-first-served basis)

Medium of Instruction: English

Duration:4 hours in 2 weeks

Venue: CUHK eLearning Platform

Programme Fee:
HK$1,125 (USD 145)

Biography: Mr. Fred YUNG
Founder, Smart Start, a start-up training and consulting company

Frederick WS Yung, Founder of Smart Start, a company in start-up training and consultancy, is also an Adjunct Professor of the Department of Management, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong.  He has taught business planning and entrepreneurial fund-raising in the MBA Programme of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) as a part-time lecturer from 2014-2017, as well as entrepreneurship in the University of Nottingham Ningbo Campus (UNNC), China, as a Visiting Assistant Professor.  He carries with him more than 30 years of senior management experience in local and overseas marketing, business planning/operation.  As Head of Incubation at HK Science and Technology Parks Corporation, he has nurtured start-ups, coached entrepreneurs in investment fundraising, while running an incubator with over 100 start-ups.Prior to joining UNNC, he headed the Business Incubation Programme of HK Science and Technology Parks Corporation (“HKSTP”) and had incubated more than 300 technology and design start-ups and reviewed over 1,000 business plans. Before his tenure at the HKSTP, he was the Business Services Operations Director of Xerox (HK) Ltd, Chief Executive of Dodwell Business Machines, a Deputy General Manager of Jardine Marketing Services Ltd. and the Regional Field Services Marketing Manager of Digital Equipment Corporation (HK) Ltd for its 11 Far Eastern countries.In 2014, he served in the brain-storming team in the curriculum development of the CUHK Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Theme, and in 2017 as the Industry Representative of the Programme Development Committee for the successful accreditation of the MSc in Entrepreneurial Management of the Hang Seng Management College (now The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong).  Mr. Yung also served as an Assessment Panel Member of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition of University Students of Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan in 2015, 2016 and 2017.  In 2017 and 2018, he served respectively as the Head Assessor for the Software & Apps, and Hardware & Device of the ICT Awards Startup Categories organized by the OGCIO of the HKSAR Government.  He has been on the Admission Panel of the HK Science and Technology Parks Corporation’s Incubation Programme since 2015, and the Venture Investment Connect Programme since 2019.  He is also a frequent speaker in universities, incubators and co-working spaces on entrepreneurship and fund-raising.Mr. Yung was the Honourary Trainer of the Hong Kong Business Angel Network (HKBAN), and is a Certified Programme Facilitator of Kepner-Tregoe’s Problem Solving and Decision Making course and Learning International Limited’s Professional Selling Skills course.  He received his Bachelor of Commerce degree from Loyola College, Montreal Canada and his MBA from University of British Columbia, Canada.

Mr. Eric Yu

Phone: (852) 3943 8772
Email: apib@cuhk.edu.hk