Entrepreneurship

This course introduces students to the concept of "entrepreneurship" and gives them an academic framework to understand and analyze the theory and practices of entrepreneurial endeavors. This course draws from many different disciplines and includes topics such as the motivation for entrepreneurship (individual, organizational, social/community), processes of entrepreneurship, and "soft skills" to help cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset such as persuasion, collaboration, and communication.

The European Innovation Academy (EIA) Entrepreneurship & Innovation Summer School is the world's largest entrepreneurial summer program, with a special focus on digital innovations. The accelerated program turns an idea into a startup in just 15 days! The goal of this course is to give students a hands-on, real-life experience creating a startup with students from around the world. The course challenges participants to innovate, overcome obstacles, and grow rapidly; with the goal of creating a business valued at 100M EUR or more. The course is led by the top tech speakers, mentors, and investors from around th world who leverage the skills, mindset, and knowledge necessary to coach and inspire participants to achieve set goals. The course is taught in a real-life context, where students form teams of five and acquire the skills and know-how to develop their business idea from the conceptual stage to the marketplace. They are guided in building a scalable business model via real-life experiments and tests in a live marketplace with genuine customer feedback and building up real life customer traction. The challenge unfolds in a learning environment that corresponds to current and future workplace requirements including cross-functional and virtual teams with crowdsourced work tasks, a multicultural workforce, and extremely demanding organization, planning and communication skills. CPS Only, Permission of Director Required.

This capstone course is the culminating experience for the Entrepreneurship major where students will have the opportunity to integrate and apply the concepts and skills learned throughout the major. Students will work on projects to build innovative businesses, social enterprises, or non-profit ventures starting with ideation, validation, testing, building, pitching, through launch. This course will feature guest lectures from successful entrepreneurs and Villanova alumni.