Graduate
MBA
At the MBA level, the Whitman School offers a concentration in entrepreneurship, focusing on entrepreneurial management—how to bring an entrepreneurial perspective to the challenges and opportunities confronting organizations of all sizes and types. All Whitman MBA students also complete the Global Entrepreneurial Management course, which is a field experience built around the actual implementation of an entrepreneurial concept.
MS
The MS in Entrepreneurship program provides a rigorous immersion into the nature of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial process. Core content is coupled with a strong commitment to experiential learning. The program is a component of the university-wide entrepreneurship emphasis at SU and is targeted to students with a passion for entrepreneurship in for-profit, non-profit, and public sector contexts. It consists of 30 credit hours of coursework and can be completed in one year.
Graduate Courses
Corporate Entrepreneurship
This course is about understanding how and why existing corporations behave entrepreneurially. In other words, this course examines one of the most central challenges that all firms face today. Topics covered in this course include identifying obstacles to entrepreneurship and developing strategies to overcome these; promoting creativity, innovation, and risk-taking behavior within the firm; acquiring and managing knowledge in the pursuit of opportunities; managing growth; and empowering and rewarding all areas of the firm to be entrepreneurial. This is also an applied course, where students must take the ideas, concepts, tools, and frameworks to which they are exposed and apply them in a series of real world cases and contexts.
Entrepreneurship and Empowerment in South Africa
This course supports the survival and growth of existing small businesses in Cape Town, South Africa. The EEE department, teamed with the Stellenbosch University in South Africa, provides training sessions and facilitates consulting interventions allowing students to develop an understanding of the challenges and barriers to success encountered by firms that are generally undercapitalized, lack market leverage, have no deep knowledge of business “specialty” support functions such as accounting, law, finance, marketing or advertising, and lack economies of scale or scope. The program focuses enabling small enterprise to meet their challenges and create sustainable competitive advantage and long-term value.
Entrepreneurship and Corporate Venturing
An introductory course for Whitman MBA students examining the concept of entrepreneurship from both individual and corporate perspectives. At the individual level,students learn how to start, grow, manage, and sustain a new enterprise. At the corporate level, they focus on the requirements for creating and managing new ventures or significant new business opportunities within existing organizations.
Financing the Emerging Enterprise
This
is an elective designed to give students a thorough background in the most complicated and challenging areas of entrepreneurship: accounting and finance. Through a combined use of text, case studies, and live examples, students attempt to define the optimum approach to financing a new and growing company, while avoiding the pitfalls of companies which have failed.
Dilemmas and Debates in Entrepreneurship
A topical course taught exclusively by entrepreneurs, and coordinated by an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Each week, one or more entrepreneurs are invited in to lead discussions that impact the practice of entrepreneurship, including the role of individuals versus teams in entrepreneurial efforts, how to deal with partners, managers versus entrepreneurs, dealing with failure, building and using networks, harvesting strategies, and ethical challenges in entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship in Engineering and Science
This course bridges the gap between technical competence and entrepreneurial proficiency. Students are not expected to have any formal business background, but instead, to have a strong background in specific technical fields such as the engineering disciplines, computer science, biology, chemistry, and medicine. The course provides the necessary exposure to the fundamentals of business, and approaches entrepreneurship as a manageable process built around innovativeness, risk-taking, and initiative.
Entrepreneurial Marketing
Taking a pragmatic view of entrepreneurship and the set of concepts and skills that entrepreneurial thinkers use to gain an edge as marketing practitioners. Students gain unique perspectives on how to market entrepreneurial concepts by using imagination, intuition, innovation, and ideation.
D'Aniello Entrepreneurial Internship
An internationally recognized initiative that provides unique entrepreneurial opportunities for highly qualified students in the Whitman School. These appointments require student interns to work directly with an entrepreneur, president, or senior executive in a high-growth, innovative company located in the greater-Syracuse metropolitan area. Interns are expected to add meaningful value to the work environment and to produce a number of useful deliverables to company management. Interns may also undertake independent study in order to meet certain curriculum requirements.
Theoretical Foundations in Entrepreneurship
Concerned with the intellectual roots of entrepreneurship research, proving knowledge about the intellectual roots and history of the field so that students are able to understand the current debates in entrepreneurship and to contribute to these discussions. Some of the topics covered are the roots of economic thought, entrepreneurship’s contribution to the development of economic theory, psychological approaches to entrepreneurship, and finally, the intertwined relationship between organizations and entrepreneurship.
Introduction to Innovation Management
Providing students with a basic understanding of how innovative activities of a firm are managed: generating and screening new product/process ideas or concepts, transforming these ideas or concepts into products, processes, or services that are useful for one or more target markets, and developing strategies and tactics that ensure successful diffusion of the innovation.
Managing New Product Development
The
focus of this course is on how new products and new technologies are indentified, evaluated, and developed. Special emphasis is placed on the strategic dimensions of innovation as well as the management of the innovation process. Students undertake the development of a new product or service as part of the course requirements.
Marketing Strategies for the Diffusion of Innovations
The
focus of this course is on strategies for the successful introduction of new products into the market and the effective management of product portfolio in a dynamic market environment. Students not only learn important theories, models, and principles of new product diffusion and competitive marketing strategy, they also participate in a computer-based simulation, Markstrat, to learn from hands-on experience of applying related theories to a “real world” market competition.
Opportunity Recognition and Ideation
Providing students with the skills, tools, and mindsets to enable them to discover other people’s problems upon which entrepreneurial ventures may be built and to use their own creativity to generate solutions to these problems. The techniques and skills learned during the course apply equally well to start-ups and established firms. With the goal of discovering opportunities for innovation, students develop their discovery skills by studying consumers in a product-made market of their choosing. The course culminates in a “trade show” in which student teams present a 3.D typical prototype of their products they have developed.
Project in Global Entreprenurial Management (GEM)
A project-based capstone course in which students explore the interface of management, strategy, operations, finance, and entrepreneurship in the context of independent ventures, non-profit ventures, and large firms. Students master the skills and competencies that facilitate opportunity recognition, innovation, and creation in the face of a dynamic and uncertain marketplace.
How to Begin
If you have questions or are interested in enrolling in the MBA or MS in Entrepreneurship program, contact Whitman's Graduate Programs Office at (315) 443-4327. |
