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Entrepreneurship and Innovation Courses

ENTP 205: Ready, Set, Fail

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

Central to developing an entrepreneurial mindset is learning to appreciate risk and the potential for failure. This course will introduce students to forms and causes of failure, and will explore and analyze responses to failure. Students will capitalize on their own experiences with failure to build future success.


ENTP 100: Innovation Ecosystem

Credits: 1.0
Level: UG

This course is designed to introduce students to the numerous and varied innovative activities that are part of Drexel University, University City and the greater Philadelphia region. The course sparks curiosity about innovations and ideas not commonly encountered and stimulates creative thinking about new opportunities.


ENTP 105: Entrepreneurial Thinking

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course is intended for anyone interested in developing an entrepreneurial mindset for success in starting their own venture, or working in an established company or new start-up venture. Students will develop a mindset that will enable them to build a toolkit to create and evaluate entrepreneurial opportunities, marshal resources, and form teams driven by creativity, leadership, and smart action. In sum, this course is a journey through the fuzzy, front-end of early-stage entrepreneurial activity. This course is not intended to be a complete overview of entrepreneurship; it is an immersion experience for students to cultivate entrepreneurial thinking, not only to find and create opportunities, but in all that they do.


ENTP 109: Idea Accelerator I

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course is designed for students to learn and implement the steps necessary to accelerate the launch of a new business, process, product, or service. Gain the tools, skills, and demonstrated ability to transform an idea into a reality – better, faster, and cheaper. Supports and strengthens entrepreneurial concepts and strategies: ideation, project planning, requirements gathering, process building, and MVP implementation. This course will cover core capabilities needed by entrepreneurs to single-handedly move from ideation to launch, with less risk, higher probability of success, and increased sustainability.


ENTP 201: The Starter's Toolkit

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course centers on entrepreneurial practice in terms of the fundamental tools and process for aspiring entrepreneurs. Apply your growing understanding of the foundational tools and process entrepreneurs use to adapt and evolve as the world changes rapidly due to technological, social, and economic transformation. Disruption has shaken every industry, global competition is fierce, job security a thing of the past. Virtually every one of you will engage in the workforce either as an entrepreneur and/ or as a member of an entrepreneurial team. This course offers a backdrop from which to meet that challenge, furnishing tools you will need to recognize and leverage entrepreneurial opportunities: resource use and adaptability, experimentation, customer focus, collaboration, and rational risk-taking.


ENTP 209: Build, Measure, Learn

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course is designed to immerse students in the process and mindset associated with the entrepreneurial Build-Measure-Learn cycle through iterative design and prototyping with close customer engagement to ensure students are developing profitable offerings that are aligned with the value proposition of their target customers and marketplace. This involves the fundamental building blocks and methods for creating pre-MVP (minimum viable product) solutions using a wide range of no-code or low-code technology modeling tools in the context of customer discovery, and a continuous learning process as students directly test market interest and operational viability. This approach helps entrepreneurs to ensure that they are using scarce resources wisely during the “bootstrapping” stage of new venture development.


ENTP 210: Leading Start-Ups

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

Entrepreneurs face unique leadership challenges, especially when founding a new company. This course provides the student and aspiring entrepreneur with tools and frameworks necessary for creating strategy, building companies, and assembling human capital with limited resources. By exploring what entrepreneurial leaders actually do, and how they do it, the student will learn through experiential exercises both the challenges and the excitement of starting a new venture.


ENTP 215: Building Entrepreneurial Teams

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

The overall goal of this course is to evaluate the different approaches in forming teams during the startup of a new company. We will compare and contrast evidence-based and anecdotal team formation models to determine their advantages and disadvantages as well as their effects on the expected outcomes.


ENTP 225: Mindfulness & Wellbeing

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

Modern-day demands create stress in workers’ lives, and gone unmanaged, stress can have devastating physical, psychological and financial implications. Investing in one’s psychological and emotional health pays long-term dividends because it buffers the negative effects of stress, and helps individuals become their best selves. Based upon the practice of mindfulness, and the domain of positive psychology, this course teaches students how to cope with contemporary challenges, and to become more proactive and to flourish in their entrepreneurial endeavors despite them.


ENTP 250: Ideation

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

Innovation is the driving force behind today’s economy and ideation supports an individual’s ability to innovate. This course provides students with tools, methods and self‐reflection techniques necessary to bring new ideas into reality. Through creative innovation, successful entrepreneurs not only create new ventures but also re-invent companies to remain competitive in an ever-changing market. Students in this course will use ideation techniques to develop new ideas, change or build upon established practices and apply these techniques in approaching and analyzing business situations. Students will be able to apply creative skills more effectively both personally and professionally.


ENTP 260: Curiosity, Ecology, Empathy & Ethic

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

Before one can begin to properly address issues of sustainability, they need a foundation in ecosystems and an ability to immerse themselves, without judgment or inhibition, deep within their surroundings. They need to learn how to to practice Curiosity, Ecology, Empathy, and Ethic (CEEE). At the roots of our most pressing environmental and social problems is pronounced disconnect between humans and nature and between humans and humans. Using the city of Philadelphia as the extended classroom, this course leads students through an immersive exploration of the city, diving deep into its diverse urban, natural, social, cultural, spontaneous, and other ecosystems. Students will acquire an ecological, empathetic, ethical comprehension of the rich interconnectedness of everything.


ENTP 270: Social Entrepreneurship

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course examines how social entrepreneurs launch successful ventures to address the world’s most challenging social and environmental problems. The course introduces students to frameworks and methodologies that challenge current models to advance original solutions to existing problems. A passion for social change is advanced by adopting a market orientation and data-driven approaches that encompass both social and financial outcomes.


ENTP 285: Organizational Development and Change for Corporate Entrepreneurs

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

In today’s world, change and innovation are needed at every level of an organization. New processes, organizational designs, dynamic management styles, problem solving techniques, and market creation are not just for new product and service creation. An entrepreneurial mindset is the premise for the fundamental approach to meet the ongoing need for continuous change. Corporate entrepreneurs need to be well-equipped to act as change agents in an organization to diagnose, understand and address the need for change. Every organization is unique and organizational development techniques and processes should be designed specific to each organization. This course takes a deep dive into how corporate entrepreneurs can achieve planned and systematic development and improvement in a complex environment.


ENTP 290: An Entrepreneur's Introduction to Land: Its Essence, Ethics, and Opportunity

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course is an interdisciplinary primer on the various layers and attributes of land, including its ecology, economics, social context, cultural history, and long-term resource capacity. An understanding of these attributes will open the door to a host of entrepreneurial and social entrepreneurial opportunity. Comprehension of key principles is achieved through hands-on exploration, journaling, field trips, experiential discussion, and real-world projects.


ENTP 325: Early-Stage Venture Funding

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course provides students with an understanding of the opportunities, challenges and methodologies typically associated with early-stage venture funding. It exposes students to the concepts, common practices and tools related to the funding needs of early-stage ventures with a focus on bootstrapping, friends/family financing, crowdfunding, angel-stage and venture capital investment. This course will also teach students to begin to think like an investor, evaluating startup investment decisions at each stage of a startup’s development. In this way, students will be able to critically examine decision criteria around investment decisions, key questions to ask founders, and better understand what founders need to do to create the best possible conditions for favorable investments.


ENTP 329: Entrepreneurship & New Technologies

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course introduces you to the challenges of assessing the commercial potential of new technologies. While technological innovation can lead to competitive advantage for a new or existing firm, it’s usually unclear in the beginning as to whether a new technology can be successful in the marketplace. This includes the complexity of intellectual property management, team development, sources of funding, commercialization pathways and other critical factors. Working in teams, you will assess Drexel-based technologies for their commercial potential and will provide a feasibility assessment to assess how the technology might be successful in the marketplace. You will also examine the implications of certain new technologies from social, ethical and legal perspectives.


ENTP 340: Managing Entrepreneurial Growth

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course teaches students the essential concepts and skills that you need to successfully grow and manage a new business. Because managing growth includes leveraging assets and controlling risks at every stage of a new venture’s development, this course focuses on areas that are essential to a new venture’s growth, including planning, marketing, talent management, and financial performance. Through case studies and other experiential exercises, students will examine the growth opportunities of new ventures and then develop small business or new venture growth proposals. Students will also examine how firms obtain the necessary physical, financial and human resources necessary to grow a business during its formative years.


ENTP 345: Drexel University Innovation Fund Due Diligence Analysis

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

Students will learn how to think and act as venture capital fund analysts by actively participating in the due diligence aspects of Drexel University’s Innovation Fund (DUIF). Under the guidance of the course instructor, students will learn critical aspects of venture capital due diligence, meet and engage with DUIF applicants, analyze application materials, develop investment suitability analysis, and draft and present recommendations to the DUIF Selection Committee and External Advisory Committee.


ENTP 370: Global Entrepreneurship

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course focuses on international opportunity identification for new and emerging companies; market analysis; joint ventures, regional legal and cultural issues and financing foreign ventures. The course will provide students with an understanding of the complexities faced by entrepreneurs doing business in a global environment and with knowledge, which will help them to be successful within the global context. In classroom discussion, emphasis will be placed on entrepreneurship in the Eurozone, Brazil, Russia, India and China, however class projects (and discussion) will touch upon numerous countries across the globe.


ENTP 375: 3BL - Triple Bottom Line

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

The course seeks to develop students’ critical capacities for reflection and action based upon a systems-thinking framework, with respect to social, environmental, and organizational challenges and the ways in which new ventures can address them. Students will learn about the history of the sustainability movement as it is the precursor of modern triple bottom line organizational forms. Lectures and readings provide the history of the sustainability movement, social movements that led to innovation, and alternative perspectives on the global economy. The course addresses the pros and cons of growing and supporting local business vs. engaging with business on a global scale.


ENTP 385: Innovation in Established Companies

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course provides students with an understanding of how companies remain competitive using innovation as the driving force behind product or service development. Entrepreneurs challenge assumptions and create value in established organizations. While most executives would agree that innovation is the key to a sustainable business in the 21st century, few seem to understand how to make it a reality. Students will be introduced to various kinds of internal and joint ventures, such as corporate venture-capital investments, alliances, mergers, and acquisitions to create value and promote entrepreneurship within an organization. Students will develop skills that are important for careers in an entrepreneurial setting and corporate venture activities.


ENTP 395: Entrepreneurship Practicum

Credits: 12.0
Level: UG

The Entrepreneurship Practicum is a one-term experiential learning element within the three-year BA in Entrepreneurship & Innovation degree program. The Practicum provides you with a “hands-on” opportunity to use your learned entrepreneurial skills to develop your new startup idea, to work on the development of a new business idea within a startup company, or to work on new innovations in an existing business or family enterprise.


ENTP 410: Thought Leadership

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

The individual entrepreneur faces many challenges. This course takes a philosophical and ethical approach to developing the entrepreneurial mindset. This course examines the ethical challenges in a start-up venture or high-growth firm, as illustrated through discussions by guest speakers–serial entrepreneurs. Students will be required to reflect on the varying viewpoints presented by the distinguished experts, and will develop their own approaches and philosophies regarding “the entrepreneur” and the “process of entrepreneurship.”.


ENTP 440: Launch It!: Early Stage

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course is for students seeking to apply an entrepreneurial mindset within for-profit and/or nonprofit ventures in the early stages of growth. Students will be expected to implement and exhibit the entrepreneurial competencies of resilience, opportunity recognition, and ideation in the launch of an initiative, product and/or service within an existing company. With provided scenarios, students will develop research skills to help support and guide the business model validation for a new organizational initiative, or a new product/service commercialization path.


ENTP 445: GreenStart: Applying Entrepreneurship to Cultivate Sustainable Solutions

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

GreenStart is geared to equip students with the knowledge and actual experience of how to launch a green business that addresses an area of sustainability and also has a likelihood of sustainable financial return. The course calls attention to specific areas of environmental need, including climate change impacts, water issues, sustainable food production, native plant production, hydroponics, waste management and re-use, and sustainable urban land use. Students will work in small, diverse teams to quickly generate design solutions ensuring that all voices in the team are heard and counted. By course end, students will move on with the hands-on experience of having brought a green product or service to launch stage, along with the broad-based understanding of how to start up a green business on one’s own.


ENTP 450: Launch It!

Credits: 3.0
Level: UG

This course is designed for those serious about being entrepreneurs. Students will be expected to work on the actual launching of a start-up. The course involves talking to customers, partners, competitors, experimenting with different business models, validating a market need through customer development, and building all facets of a start-up company. *Admission to this course requires a student to be an Entrepreneurship and Innovation major with a concentration in New Venture Creation or approval by the professor.


ENTP 501: Entrepreneurship Practice & Mindset

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

Master’s-level introductory course designed for all Drexel graduate students who are looking to begin to explore entrepreneurship. With the foundational belief in the individual as the cornerstone of enterprise, this course introduces those skills and characteristics central to an entrepreneurial “habit of mind” or entrepreneurial mindset to support pursuits as wide-ranging as going into business for yourself to landing a leadership role within a larger organization. Entrepreneurship begins with gaining insight into, and facility with, one’s own tools and skills to better recognize, frame and leverage them for personal and professional opportunity.


ENTP 515: Pitch It!

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

The entrepreneur’s pitch deck and presentation are critical to the funding process and it should not be underestimated how important they are to the success or failure of a startup. The investor-level presentation is unlike any other business presentation, as investors are typically a demanding and impatient audience. This course is designed for students who want to learn how to create and present effective, investor-level presentations for an entrepreneurial startup.


ENTP 535: Social Entrepreneurship

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

This course is designed to immerse graduate students in social entrepreneurship ventures through experiential learning. While introducing students to frameworks and methodologies that address societal problems through data-driven and market approaches, students will simultaneously work with a social entrepreneur in the development of their existing business or their business model.


ENTP 540: Approaches to Entrepreneurship

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

This course examines approaches to entrepreneurship from a wide range of contexts including traditional profit-driven enterprises, social enterprises, and microenterprises in both mature and emerging economies. Students will be introduced to modern entrepreneurial concepts including lean start up methodology, B-corporations, and Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) markets. Application and reinforcement of course concepts will be highlighted through class discussions and case analyses.


ENTP 575: Entrepreneurship in Education

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

This course focuses on the design of early-stage education ventures and on the programmatic, curricular and/or pedagogical innovations within established educational organizations or institutions. Students will design and develop their own education innovation, to include a theory of change or logic model, business/mission model canvas, assumption-testing, and culminate with a capstone/pitch.


ENTP 601: Social and Sustainable Innovation

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

This course seeks to tap students’ entrepreneurial mindsets to create social and sustainable market-based solutions to the global challenges identified in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of 2030. Using their local communities as the context, themselves as a change agent, and relevant stakeholders as partners, students will pitch social and sustainable startups or innovations in existing firms that will help in achieving a particular SDG.


ENTP 611: Learning from Failure

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

This course will define failure, analyze the causes of it, and present students with a framework they can use to help them be better prepared for learning from failure in order to drive the entrepreneur’s level of entrepreneurial preparedness for further enterprising activities. Through a series of in-depth reflections of personal and professional “failures” and challenges, graduate students will develop a portfolio of resilience mechanisms to better prepare them for an entrepreneurial life.


ENTP 621: Innovation & Ideation

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

This course provides students with tools, methods, and self-reflection techniques necessary to bring new ideas to reality while also providing them with ways to learn about how to test the viability of and response to their ideas in the market. Learning through iteration is a key component of this course as it is expected that the first version of any idea is not likely the last. Human-centered design methodologies will be front-and-center in this course from the perspective of how to innovate based not on the ideas of the innovator but based first on the needs of the customer. This course reviews the importance of innovation, not only in new products and services, but also in the underlying business models where unexpected sources of innovation can be found.


ENTP 631: Building Internal & External Relationships

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

This course focuses on how early relationships, roles, and reward decisions cause tensions within the founding team. It also covers founders’ recurring tension between keeping control of their ventures and attracting the resources needed to build the venture, initially, using founder/CEO succession as a microcosm of that tension and then broadening to key decisions throughout the founding process. This course introduces the next key players in the venture: cofounders and non-founding hires.


ENTP 641: Innovation in Established Companies

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

This course develops skills that are important for students who are interested in pursuing careers in an entrepreneurial setting and corporate venture activities. This course should be of interest to anyone who wants to develop their entrepreneurial thinking on various innovation approaches.


ENTP 671: Life After Launch

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

This course is a comprehensive examination of the knowledge and skills that younger startups need to operate and grow their small and/or growing ventures within today’s dynamic business environment. Included are practical concepts typically faced in small to medium- sized businesses, including: financing, marketing, strategic planning, inventory control, cash flow, and recruiting and retaining talent. Legal issues, forms of ownership and strategies for growth are also addressed.


ENTP 681: The Startup Way: How to Drive Innovation in Entrepreneurial Companies

Credits: 3.0
Level: GR

In this course, students will learn tools to facilitate continuous transformation in their organizations i.e., the ability to employ entrepreneurship to ignite innovation in response to new and diverse challenges and to be prepared to do this repeatedly. Students will benefit by learning how to create an innovative culture and environment grounded in the establishment of an entrepreneurial mindset in high-growth organizations, industries, and contexts.


ENTP I299: Independent Study in Entrepreneurship

Credits: 1.0-12.0
Level: UG

Self-directed within the area of study requiring intermittent consultation with a designated instructor.


ENTP I599: Independent Study in Entrepreneurship

Credits: 1.0-12.0
Level: UG

Self-directed within the area of study requiring intermittent consultation with a designated instructor.


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Thank you for your interest in the Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship. To learn more, contact us.

215.895.2566