Technology Entrepreneurship
Technology entrepreneurship, our newest concentration, focuses on the emerging and ever-relevant global technology space.
It’s all in the name for this concentration—you engage with how technology shapes and informs our world, how to harness innovation and entrepreneurship to build ventures, and the impact these ventures can have on markets, society, and the planet. You learn about emerging trends, how specific machines and web technologies work, corporate innovation and entrepreneurship, and how to scale, fund, and market technology products and services.
Where the Technology Entrepreneurship Concentration Will Take You
Courses dive deep into various internet and artificial intelligence technologies, how technology ventures receive and use funding, and how to lead technology ventures. Whether you want to start your own venture or join an existing one, consult, become a technical entreprenuer, or help an established company bring a product to market, this concentration provides the data, critical thinking, technological entrepreneurship and management skills, and technical skills, including data management and coding, to confidently do that. You will have the opportunity to work with real companies and help them problem solve in real-time.
Apart from gaining credentials similar to an innovation and entrepreneurship degree, students hone the skills and mindset they develop learning from experts in the entrepreneurship, operations and information management fields, with internships and entry-level jobs at agencies, larger technology companies, and financial institutions.
Come think like a technical entrepreneur with the technology prowess and entrepreneurial leadership experience to back it up.
What You Will Study in Your Technology Entrepreneurship Courses
To complete the technology entreprenuership concentration, you take two of the following foundational courses and then two electives of your choice.
Foundational Courses
As part of your coursework in the technology entrepreneurship concentration, you will take:
Investigate the 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, while gaining an understanding of personal entrepreneurial capacity, team building, and management. This a course similar to something you would find in a bachelor’s in innovation program.
You will also take one of the following two courses as part of your foundational learning:
Learn the general design and programming skills that are needed for website development. You will explore languages and tools of the web, including the hyper-text markup (HTML), cascading style sheet (CSS), and JavaScript languages. You will also learn some design concepts, design methodology, and project management and publish your own website.
Explore techniques and strategies to identify, approach and solve problems in business and personal areas. You will learn how to write computer programs to offer efficient solutions for certain types of problems using a computer programming language such as Python. The examples and problems used in this course are drawn from diverse areas such as text processing, webpage scraping, web development and data analytics.
Electives
You have many electives to choose from that will expand your knowledge base and enrich your understanding of core and emerging technological and entrepreneurial concepts, including:
Plan a crowdfunding campaign for a creative project or entrepreneurial venture by organizing stakeholders and leveraging in-person and online social networks. You will produce a pitch video throughout the semester and learn about emerging research on crowdfunding. Goals of crowdfunding include stakeholder alignment, concept testing, product pre-selling and venture de-risking.
High-tech entrepreneurship considers ways to generate and monetize innovations, making ideas profitable and sustainable. Work in teams to identify multiple entrepreneurial innovation opportunities, through user engagement and extensive prototyping. In this seminar that’s in our renowned Weissman Foundry, you will investigate and determine unmet needs and innovative solutions to them for different user or customer groups.
It's time to get your entrepreneurial gears moving. This course is for students who are actively pursuing a venture that has progressed well beyond the exploration stage of development and is ready to launch. You will receive support to help you achieve major development milestones in all aspects of your business, including products and services, revenue, organization, geographical expansion, distribution, partnerships, funding, profitability/sustainability, pivots, and social initiatives.
Crypto is everywhere in the news, but what exactly is it? How does it work, and how do we measure its success? The first step in answering these questions is figuring out the technology behind it. In this course, you learn about the algorithms and protocols that enable blockchain technology creation along with the theory behind cryptocurrencies.
Explore how organizations overcome the constraints and risks posed by the nascent and uncertain operating environment found in the entrepreneurial world in this capstone course. You will be assigned to a high priority project with an actual organization and will be expected to conceive and implement “Lean Start-up” principles to relieve the organization of a deeply embedded operating constraint on growth as part of this on-site, learn-by-doing partnership.
Explore the entire list of technology 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 technology entrepreneurship program.
Alisa Jno-Charles ’05, MBA’11
Alisa Jno-Charles came to Babson after more than a decade of finance and entrepreneurship experience in the private equity investment, hedge fund trading, real estate financing, and business intelligence systems design and product management spheres. Her research centers on venture identity development, traditional and social media impact, communication and discourse analysis, and legitimacy and financing acquisition.
Ganesan Shankaranarayanan (Shankar)
G. Shankaranarayanan’s research interests cover modeling and managing data and metadata in information systems; managing data quality for decision support; and economic perspectives in data management. He has taught several courses ranging from introductory courses in information systems to advanced courses in data management and systems design.
Have Questions?
Faculty Contacts: Alisa Jno-Charles ’05, MBA’11 and Ganesan Shankaranarayanan (Shankar)
Sponsoring Divisions: Entrepreneurship and Operations & Information Management
