MIT senior lecturer Bill Aulet.

MIT senior lecturer Bill Aulet, instructor for MITx courses Entrepreneurship 101: Who Is Your Customer? and Entrepreneurship 102: What Can You Do For Your Customer?

Are you an engineer who has hacked a really cool idea in your spare time, but don’t have the business acumen to start up a company? Are you a serial entrepreneur who keeps failing in business, but don’t know why? Are you working in a large corporation but pining to …do something more entrepreneurial?

If you answer “yes” to any of these, then clear some time on your busy schedule for two upcoming Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on edX. MITx is re-running the popular 15.390.1x Entrepreneurship 101: Who Is Your Customer? and releasing the new course 15.390.2x Entrepreneurship 102: What Can You Do for Your Customer?

Both courses will start on January 9, 2015, and will run simultaneously so you don’t have to wait for the followup course. And for the first time, MIT will be translating the courses into Spanish, French, Mandarin, Arabic and Turkish, so that aspiring entrepreneurs whose native tongue isn’t English will also be able to learn how to start a company using the “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” framework.

15.390.1x kicks off the entrepreneurial journey by focusing on any startup’s most essential resource: the customer. One of the rookie mistakes that entrepreneurs often make is to come up with a great technology or product without considering “who is your customer?” In 15.390.2x, the journey continues by shifting focus toward understanding your startup’s competitive advantage, asking “what can you do for your customer?”

Both MOOCs are taught by MIT Sloan senior lecturer Bill Aulet. They are based on his MIT course 15.390 New Enterprises, whose teaching materials are on OCW — just one of over sixty openly-licensed MIT courses in OCW’s Entrepreneurship Courses collection.