Undergraduate Courses

The Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation develops undergraduate courses to enable students to begin understanding the challenges of entrepreneurship. Current offerings include:

IEMS 295 Principles of Entrepreneurship

This is an introductory course for students that have limited or no prior exposure to business. It has been designed to build a knowledge foundation in all the key entrepreneurial subject areas. Each week, a new topic will be introduced using both lecture and case discussion teaching methodes. We will help you learn each of these areas from an entrepreneurial perspective. This includes accounting, finance, and marketing. The final deliverable will be an elevator pitch.

This course is taught in the Spring by Professors Marasco & White.

IEMS 325 Engineering Entrepreneurship

The goal of the course is to provide you with an understanding of the environment of the entrepreneur. At the same time we will look at the concept of intrapreneuring (the entrepreneur inside the corporation). Through a series of cases the excitement and complexity of a new business becomes apparent. The work and the tasks faced by the entrepreneur are similar to those encountered in other management roles. There is, however, one essential ingredient that usually is quite different. The entrepreneur must work with an extremely limited set of resources. However the offset to this situation is the flexibility and speed with which the entrepreneur may act.

This course is taught by Professors Marasco, Werwath and White.

Graduate Courses

The Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation develops graduate courses to enable students to expand upon their understanding of the challenges of entrepreneurship and innovation. Current offerings include:

IEMS 419 Technical Entrepreneurship

419 Technical Entrepreneurship is designed to focus on the opportunities and challenges associated with starting a technology venture. The single greatest wealth creator of our generation and of every generation before us has been technology. Today, state of the art technology can be defined as nanotechnology, biotechnology, and Web 2.0. In previous generations, it was defined as the television and the internal combustion engine. In many cases, the innovator was not the entity that invented it or was best-positioned to introduce it to the marketplace.

Before the business comes the idea. The goal of this class is to evolve an idea into a complete business. We will study all phases in the development of a business. We will provide students with a toolkit to more effectively create, assess, and build ideas into businesses. This class cannot make you into an entrepreneur or intrapreneur. It can help you better assess whether an idea is a business opportunity and how to transform that opportunity into a business.

This class is taught by Professors Marasco and Voboril.

IEMS 495 Medical Innovation

Medical Innovation is a two-quarter sequence focused on the creation of innovations for the health industry. Students, guided by faculty and physicians from McCormick, Kellogg, Feinberg and the Law School will work in teams to develop medical products. Students experience the entire innovation life cycle from ideation to prototyping, legal protection, market sizing and business plan development. At the end of the course, the teams present their business plans to a panel of venture capitalists with the goal of securing funding and possible formation of a start-up. Key deliverables in this class include: elevator pitch to request prototype/pilot funding, prototype development, provisional patent application, FDA 510/K application and business plan presentation to venture capitalists. To enroll in this course, permission from the instructor is required; all students need to submit an application to the instructor before registration. Students must take both the fall and winter quarter courses, in sequence, and will earn 2.0 credits after successfully completing both courses.

This class is taught by Professors Marasco and Voboril as well as leading faculty from the other Northwestern schools listed above.