Professor Rhee’s primary teaching areas focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. Currently, he teaches courses such as Lean Startup, New Venture Management, and Strategy in the AI Age to a diverse range of students, including undergraduates, full-time and part-time MBA students, and those in executive programs. His pedagogical approach emphasizes hands-on exercises in idea generation, problem-solving, and decision-making, which are facilitated through in-class simulation games and case studies. Additionally, he delivers external lectures and offers consulting services, focusing on the role of leadership in innovation and change for company executives, as well as on behavioral strategies to enhance creativity and performance for general audiences. Below is a brief summary of two courses, New Venture Management and Lean Startup, that Professor Rhee currently teaches at UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business.

New Venture Management (MGMT MBA 213)

This course is designed to diagnose structural and psychological barriers to new venture management and develop solutions that an entrepreneur can put in place to remedy those barriers. This course will not touch upon technical IT topics or business strategy issues void of people considerations. Instead, it will focus on managing people, resources and processes in a venture firm that aims to improve innovation and adapt to turbulent environments.

In this course, we will take a general management (vs. a functional specialist) approach (assuming that you are an entrepreneur) in order to develop your competence in using diagnostic and action tools for managing and growing a venture firm. This objective is reflected in the way the course is taught. You will learn how to alternate between thinking in abstract concepts and frameworks, applying them to real, concrete situations and reflecting on them. In sum, we will keep alternating between simplifying concepts for the sake of clarity and complexifying applications for the sake of realism throughout the course. As a result of such intellectual exercise, you will develop an ability to understand how successful entrepreneurs think and behave differently from less successful ones and why some venture firms grow and thrive while others do not.

Lean Startup (Fully Employed MBA 290)

Venture capitalists and other stakeholders increasingly invest in later-stage entrepreneurial firms and make larger-scale investments than they did in the past. One key reason is that prospective or serial entrepreneurs have begun to seriously adopt what is called “lean startup” as a conceptual methodology to have a business plan advanced before they apply for venture capital funds. The lean startup has been popularized so that investors are driven to make their financial decision in favor of entrepreneurs who equip themselves with a feasible, advanced idea that results from the adoption of the lean startup. As an essential methodology (and philosophy) for entrepreneurs, the lean startup provides a systematic approach for them to turn an entrepreneurial idea into a commercializable outcome, and teaches them how to develop a business model, build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), set up a hypothesis about the effectiveness of their prototype product, gather and learn from customer feedback, and pivot their business model.

This course is designed to provide you with the experience of the lean startup process within the constraints of a classroom. This course is project-based, presentation-based such that you spend much time in working on an entrepreneurial idea with teammates and giving a presentation about your project progress regularly in class. You are required to get your hands dirty talking to customers and partners (even during the pandemic, I believe that there are various “online” communication channels to do so). You practice evidence-based entrepreneurship as you learn how to draft, hypothesize and test a business model and, in doing so, will get out of the classroom to see whether anyone other than you would want/use your product or service. Ultimately, you develop and iterate on an MVP to rapidly evolve your idea into something that customers become willing to buy.