Entrepreneurship
It’s all in the name—this concentration is all about the entrepreneurial experience.
This course of study in the Babson entrepreneurship program focuses on the creation of social and economic value by developing core capabilities of Entrepreneurial Thought & Action® (ET&A™), where you start with an idea, a problem you recognize, or an area of passion, and you shape this into an opportunity by taking action through iterative small steps that enable you to learn, assess, and continually adapt or pivot. This is why our business degree is considered one of the top undergraduate entrepreneurship programs.
Where the Entrepreneurship Concentration Will Take You
It’s an adaptable, versatile concentration, setting you up for success in founding or joining a startup, or enacting entrepreneurship in an existing organization of various kinds (social, family, corporate, etc.). The Babson entrepreneurship program courses cover ideation (generating lots of ideas!), launching and growing ventures, various contexts in which one can be entrepreneurial (fashion industry, AI, family), and specific skills and functions (design thinking, finance, sustainability).
Entrepreneurship includes forming teams, constructing business models, talking with partners and customers, and assessing feasibility, while launching a new venture or initiative. The skills and competencies gained in an entrepreneurship concentration are vital for the pursuit of new venture opportunities in any business or organization.
Our concentrations are designed to help you specialize or explore options within our bachelor's in business administration degree, but the courses offered are comparable to what’s offered in an entrepreneurial studies major or minor program, as well as a bachelor’s of science in entrepreneurship.
What You Will Study in Your Entrepreneurship Courses
The entrepreneurship concentration includes a required four-credit course and a selection of electives to enhance your education and expand your interests and opportunities.
Required Course (choose one)
This course concentrates on identifying and evaluating opportunities for new business. The primary purpose is to investigate concepts, tools, and practices associated with identifying or creating new venture opportunities. You will explore ways to shape and evaluate the viability of these opportunities by understanding key industry factors, market and competitive factors, and customer needs. You will gain a better understanding of personal entrepreneurial capacity, team building, and management, and are augmented with readings, guest speakers, videos, and software simulations.
Course Description
Creating a new venture that has technology as a basis for its products or services presents special challenges. On one hand is the push of new technology, as evidenced by the plethora of scientific invention and technological innovation. On the other hand is the pull of the market as it presents new entrepreneurial opportunities. Other key challenges present themselves in areas of intellectual property protection, team building and funding opportunities. In this course we will explore entrepreneurship in technology industries in depth with the hope of penetrating the popular veneer, and uncovering the guts of starting a growing new technology ventures. Of course, there is a lot about new technology venturing that is common to all new venture creation, and also the qualities entrepreneurs demonstrate are valuable in a wide spectrum of life's activities.
A unique aspect of this course is its desire to include students from both Babson as well as the F.W. Olin College of Engineering. Particular value from this intermingling will be evidenced in the true interdisciplinary nature of the course field project teams that are formed, and the ability for students to begin to develop networks of relationships outside their individual domains of business or engineering.
Primary Course Objectives
- To investigate the components, tools, and practices of technology entrepreneurship: identifying new venture opportunities, evaluating the viability of a new business concept, calibrating risk of successful technology development, protecting intellectual property, building a team that possesses the attributes necessary for success, obtaining appropriate financing, writing a business plan, and developing an investor presentation, creating an entrepreneurial culture that increases the odds of success, and creating liquidity for shareholders.
- To identify and exercise entrepreneurial skills through classrooms debate and assignments.
- To introduce students to a variety of technology entrepreneurs. Case studies are used as tools for discussion, and are augmented with readings and guest speakers.
The core project for this course will be the development of a technology based business plan. Students will form teams to explore a business opportunity, and develop a business plan and investor presentation.
Prerequisites
SME
Elective Courses
Our entrepreneurship concentration offers over 20 electives including options in entrepreneurship in fashion, managing a growing business, and entrepreneurial finance. Students select a combination of 12 credits. Explore some of the options below.
This is not a course you’ll find in many bachelor’s in entrepreneurship programs. This experiential seminar explores the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential for creating new business opportunities. You will learn about cutting-edge technologies in AI, such as machine learning, computer vision, neural networks, and natural language processing. We will also cover recent developments in the AI industry and the impact of venture capital investment on AI startups. Throughout the course, you have the opportunity to experiment with AI technologies and develop your own innovative projects.
This course is designed to provide a strategic decision-making, future-oriented perspective in entrepreneurship for undergraduate students interested in Entrepreneurial Thought & Action ® (ET&A™) methods used by start-up, early stage ventures, and corporations that practice innovation. You explore techniques for looking at the future including scenario planning, key-trend impact analysis, systems thinking, and experiencing the gestalt of the future. Because ET&A™ is specific to Babson, this is a course you can’t get in a BS in entrepreneurship program at another school.
This course explores the stages of great entrepreneurial wealth creation, preservation, and destruction. Topics cover geographical and sector concentrations of great wealth formation, along with socio and economic conditions prevailing at the time of generation. Particular emphasis is on the detailed paths of notable entrepreneurs from the past century, along with the ethical dilemma and social contributions attributed to each of them. The course also discusses the rise and fall of great family dynasties in the section of wealth destruction. Current practice of wealth generation, preservation, and destruction methodologies will be reviewed, covering hedge funds, family offices, and entrepreneur impropriety.
The entrepreneurship in fashion course explores the challenges to entrepreneurs in the fashion industry with a view toward understanding opportunities, the changing nature of design to distribution technologies and processes, and the resources required to successfully launch and grow new ventures and corporate innovations. This course examines past, current, and leading-edge business models while building entrepreneurial skills in the fashion context to create economic and social value. Speakers from the fashion industry will be invited to converse with students about experience and opportunities in fashion.
This course, which you find in many business entrepreneurship degree programs, covers the growth phase of an entrepreneurial business, focusing on the nature and challenges of entrepreneurial businesses as they move beyond startup. The primary task for entrepreneurial firms in their growth phase is to build an organization capable of managing this growth, and then ensure the organization can sustain growth as the market and competitive environment changes. The entrepreneur needs to create a professional organization both responsive to external change and entrepreneurial enough to continually create new businesses through innovative thinking.
Explore the entire list of entrepreneurship courses
You Will Learn From the Best
At Babson, our faculty are experts, innovators, and forward thinkers in their chosen fields. Here are just some professors sharing their expertise and support with our students in the entrepreneurship program.
Lakshmi Balachandra
Lakshmi Balachandra’s research examines the impact of trust, gender, and other entrepreneurial characteristics in acquiring early-stage funding. She has been a fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, focusing on the impact of gender biases on women entrepreneurs. She was awarded fellowships for her research on VC decision-making from the Kauffman Foundation and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
Stephen Brand
Stephen Brand has been working at Babson since 2014 as a professor, mentor/co-director of the Summer Venture Program, faculty in the Summer Study Program, and working internationally in Babson Global and Executive Education. As a global entrepreneurship strategist, he engages his expertise in entrepreneurship, design thinking, and innovation as a coach and educator, helping individuals and organizations launch new ventures and scale existing ones.
Candida Brush
Candida Brush, the Franklin W. Olin Professor of Entrepreneurship, is one of the early pioneers in entrepreneurship research and conducted one of the first and largest studies in the U.S. She has co-authored reports for OECD, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, and the Goldman Sachs Foundation, and presented her work at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Eliana Crosina
Eliana Crosina holds a bachelor’s in business administration and a master’s business administration from Babson College, as well as a master’s and doctorate in organization studies from Boston College. Prior to academia, she worked in the for-profit sector as an investment banker, as well as in the not-for-profit sector, managing international development projects. Her research interests lie at the intersection of identity, entrepreneurial behavior, and cognition.
Mary Gale
Mary Gale is an educator, entrepreneur, business leader, and consultant with over 30 years of strategic, marketing, and operations experience across a broad range of industries including software-based services, diagnostics, telecommunications, surface preparation, consumer electronics, consumer packaged goods, and education.
Phillip Kim
Phillip H. Kim is an internationally recognized expert on entrepreneurship. He studies, teaches, and advises on different aspects of how entrepreneurial ideas become reality. Specifically, his research interests include start-up processes and founding teams, institutions and entrepreneurship, cross-national differences in entrepreneurship (especially in emerging economies), technology entrepreneurship, and innovation narratives.
Angela Randolph
Angela Randolph’s initial interest in entrepreneurship was inspired by working with entrepreneurs as they developed and grew their businesses. Her areas of expertise and research interests include entrepreneurship, cognition, and poverty.
Yasuhiro Yamakawa
Yasuhiro Yamakawa received his bachelor of laws from Keio University, obtained his MBA in strategic management from the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, and completed his PhD in entrepreneurship at the School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas.
Have Questions?
Faculty Contact: Mary Gale
Sponsoring Division: Entrepreneurship
