Business IDEAS for Entrepreneurship Class
Know that you have a passion for entrepreneurship but are just missing that one big idea? Or do you have so many ideas that you can’t seem to choose just one? NBA 5380 – The Business Idea Factory might just be the class for you! This Fall of 2014, Professor Brad Treat will be introducing a new entrepreneurship course housed in the Johnson School. It is a 1.5 credits, 7-week class designed to help you find and validate your big entrepreneurial idea.
Comments from Professor Treat:
Why is the course valuable to entrepreneurial students?
Entrepreneurship is hard. We all know that; it requires a lot of effort to succeed at just about anything. If you’re going to put forth all that effort, it makes sense to do so in an area where there’s the highest likelihood of success on the effort expended. The biggest part of that is choosing the right thing upon which to focus that effort. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no course at Cornell about coming up with lots of business ideas so that you can narrow down to the best one. There are courses on planning businesses; there are elements of courses on validating business ideas. I believe that students will get a lot more out of those courses, and out of their entrepreneurial endeavors, if they have a larger pool of ideas to choose from coming in.
What kind of students should/ should not take this course?
Any entrepreneurially minded student is a good fit for this course. It’s open to any major, any year. The prerequisite is an open mind and a willingness to think creatively and the requirement is to engage in the process.
What will be the challenges associated with taking this course?
This course has a large experiential component. It’s not a good fit for a student that wants to sit back and receive information through lecture. There will be a lecture component, including by experienced guest speakers, but successful students will not just engage with those talks but apply those concepts in coming up with a wide variety of ideas. Some these tasks will involve outreach – identifying, reaching out to, securing the time of, and interviewing people you don’t already know. This is an absolutely critical skill in many fields, including business; but it can be uncomfortable. “Putting yourself out there” will be a key component of succeeding in this course.
