New Venture Cluster

Core Courses:

Total number of credits: 9

Three core courses in the ENTI Minor form foundational knowledge, skills and insights into entrepreneurship, innovation and new career path options.

MGMT 215 - Entrepreneurial Mindset 

ENGR 310 - Entrepreneurial Leadership 

MGMT 425 (ENGR 425/IST 425) - New Venture Creation 

Students who complete these core courses develop skills in seven areas:

  • Self-efficacy - the belief in yourself that you can define a target and are able to attain your personal goals.

  • Leadership - the ability to bring others along to share in the opportunity and motivate effective teams with compelling communication.

  • Recognition of new opportunities - the ability to perceive needs where others have not.

  • Resourcefulness - the ability to build value using resources not fully under one's own control.

  • Creativity - the ability to look at problems from many angles and to synthesize new solutions from existing parts.

  • Comfort with ambiguity and failure - the ability to reach decisions based on complex, often conflicting sets of data.

  • Business acumen - working understanding of finance, marketing, intellectual property. 

New Ventures Cluster:

Total number of credits in this cluster: 9 or 10
Students may not use a required course from their major in the ENTI minor. Other courses, such as technical electives, out-of-college electives, and general education courses may be able to be used to meet requirements in major as well as the ENTI minor. Students may substitute up to 3 credits of research topics, internship or independent studies courses focused on relevant entrepreneurship or innovation topics in consultation with an adviser. 
 
BA 243 - Social, Legal, and Ethical Environment of Business
BA 250 - Small Business Management
MGMT 427 - Managing an Entrepreneurial Startup Company
 
The New Ventures Cluster is designed to help student develop the skills and ways of thinking required to create, develop, innovate and manage entrepreneurial companies. A successful start-up venture requires a wide range of managerial skills not usually demanded in one person within a larger organization, such as:

  • Acquiring and balancing limited resources

  • Changing direction quickly

  • Building a coherent team

  • Managing intellectual property

  • Creating new markets

The number of credits in this cluster depend on the selection of courses in the area of business law; see list of courses below. Students who complete this cluster develop skills and knowledge in 14 areas:

  • Opportunity recognition

  • New product development

  • Innovative thinking

  • Tolerance for ambiguity

  • Resource acquisition

  • Effective negotiation

  • Entrepreneurial management

  • Entrepreneurial finance

  • Effective teamwork

  • Entrepreneurial marketing

  • Entrepreneurial and innovation strategy

  • Technology commercialization

  • Intellectual property management

  • Business law