School of Entrepreneurship

The 21st century is the age of entrepreneurship. It is a time of dynamic change where organizations must be faster, more adaptable and flexible, more aggressive and more innovative in order to survive. The program in entrepreneurship helps prepare students for the entrepreneurial age. Students are encouraged to recognize and develop their innate entrepreneurial potential, and to apply an entrepreneurial mindset to both their professional and personal lives. The program emphasizes the role of entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviors in a wide variety of contexts, including new start-up ventures, growth-oriented small firms, family firms, non-profit entities and public sector organizations. Students are further encouraged to apply entrepreneurial thinking and acting within other disciplines, from architecture and engineering to social work and theatre.

Entrepreneurship is approached as opportunity-driven behavior. It is a process where individuals put resources together in new and novel ways to create value. The value created can be for customers in conventional markets, or it can be social value created for the community. The program centers on helping students develop competencies that will enable them to be more entrepreneurial in a wide variety of contexts. Eleven core competencies are emphasized, including recognizing opportunity, assessing opportunity, mastering your creativity, leveraging resources, guerrilla skills, mitigating and managing risk, planning when nothing exists, innovation-developing ideas that work, building and managing social networks, the ability to maintain focus yet adapt, and implementation of something novel or new. A leading-edge entrepreneurship curriculum is built around these competencies.

As a field of study, entrepreneurship helps students see themselves as agents of change and better equips them to implement creative solutions to emerging opportunities in literally any organizational context. To foster these abilities, the program places considerable emphasis on experiential learning. Innovative experiential opportunities are built into each of the entrepreneurship courses at the undergraduate and master's levels. In addition, the School manages an incubator, where students can start ventures, a campus-wide business Pitch & Poster Competition and other student engagement initiatives.

In addition to graduate offerings, the program offers an undergraduate major and minor in entrepreneurship as well as a cross-campus program involving the integration of entrepreneurship into other disciplines (e.g., engineering, art, psychology).