Inc. Magazine just released a list of the 10 best entrepreneurship classes taught in America for 2011. Two Boston area schools known for teaching entrepreneurship made the list, including Babson College and Harvard Business School.
Babson’s Foundations of Managing and Entrepreneurship (more fondly known as FME) is a required course for all undergraduate freshmen. After a semester of learning the fundamentals of starting a business, students in a class size of 60 rocket pitch and vote on business ideas until they are narrowed down to just two. The school floats each group of thirty students a loan to get the business started, and from voting on their CEO to weekly presentations to giving performance appraisals to peers, they have a full semester to get a real business off the ground and then liquidate it. What’s the scale of these busiensses? I went to Babson and my business racked in over $12,000 in profit which we donated to a local charity. (Check out 2011 FME businesses here.)
As for Harvard Business School, the university’s Founders’ Dilemmas class made the Inc. list this year. This class focuses on students considering being founders, forcing each to focus on themselves and the challenges and big decisions ahead of them. Throughout the semester the professor asks these Harvard entrepreneurs to answer tough questions. Should you start your business directly out of school or gain experience first? Should you have a co-founder? What if a new CEO succeeds you? The class aims to make these challenges as real life as possible. It forces you to take these founder decisions seriously, featuring lots of role-play exercises, negotiation exercises, and the personal issues and factors that are usually at the crux of weighing pros/cons in these types of founder decision making.
The other eight courses and colleges included in the list:
- Entrepreneurial Selling at the University of Chicago
- The Launch Pad at University of Miami
- Sustainable Product and Market Development for Subsistence Marketplaces at University of Illinois
- New Ventures at Willamette University
- NUvention at Northwestern University
- Technology Venturing at Ohio State
- Mayfield Fellows at Stanford University
- Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities
Curious to learn more about these innovative classrooms? Below is more information from the article about the two star classes featured here in the Hub, including their syllabi:
Foundations of Managing & Entrepreneurship (FME)
College: Babson College
Professor: A required course with multiple professors, each class is taught by a duo of professors: usually one specializes in technology and/or accounting and the other professor specializing in management and organizational behavior.
Overiew: A class that brings together 485 students to work on a series of new ventures (pictured, right is Babsonopoly, a 2004 FME business’ product)
From the article: Marketing, finance, operations, and HR can be studied separately. Entrepreneurship encompasses them all. So Babson College, a business-oriented school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, introduces its entire freshman class to the subject of business by having students start one. Throughout the year, professors teach an introductory business curriculum, which students apply immediately to their projects. Once a team of 25 to 30 students settles on a product idea, it forms a company, assigns roles, and appoints leadership. In spring, they sell their product or service. Most teams target consumers—the on-campus market is popular—but a few pursue corporate customers. At course’s end, the students distribute any profits to charities. Read more.
Syllabus:
Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship –
Founders’ Dilemma
College: Harvard Business School
Professor: Noam Wasserman (pictured, right)
Overview: A course that focuses on people problems instead of the strategy-innovation-finance trifecta.
From the article: Most entrepreneurship classes chase the strategy-innovation-finance trifecta. But people problems cause more than 60 percent of new-venture failures, research shows. Founders’ Dilemmas dissects the people decisions entrepreneurs face at critical junctures—particularly in the beginning. … Students learn to anticipate problems with investors and important hires and practice difficult conversations with both. Skipping ahead, Wasserman asks students to imagine how they will feel about ceding power to a professional CEO. “We look at the decision to stay king, even if that means you can’t attract the investors and hires the company needs,” he says. Read more.
Syllabus:
