Faculty
Heather McDougall, JD, Director of Entrepreneurship
No matter your discipline, an entrepreneurial mindset will prepare you for the new world of work while giving you a competitive edge in your field. You will learn how to think and act like an entrepreneur, recognize opportunities, solve problems, and create value.
Simply said, entrepreneurship is more than business creation and small business management. It’s a mindset that cultivates the creativity, problem-solving, and collaborative skills needed to succeed in any work environment, whether you start something new, work as an independent contractor, or work in an established organization.
To develop your entrepreneurial skills, the Offutt School of Business offers the Entrepreneurial Mindset Certificate and Entrepreneurship Minor to students of all disciplines. Entrepreneurship compliments any major.
To offer the greatest flexibility to students, the entrepreneurship certificate can be completed entirely online. The entrepreneurship minor is primarily online with one option to take classes across campus in person and hybrid capstone experience.
Courses
This course introduces students to the attitudes, behaviors, and skills needed to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. Special emphasis is placed on reflection and self-awareness approaches which help students to discover who they are, what they can do, and what they believe they are meant to do in an entrepreneurial context.
A key focus of this course is to help students recognize how an entrepreneurial mindset allows an individual to act in entrepreneurial ways--recognizing opportunities, using imagination and creativity, leveraging resources, having a sense of self-efficacy and resilience. Experiential learning opportunities will be provided as a way for students to further demonstrate and reinforce the entrepreneurial mindset developed in ENPR 240.
This course provides students hands-on experience with design thinking: a compromise between analytical and intuitive thinking, enabling the balance between originality and mastery of business ventures. Students will learn and implement the business knowledge funnel, a cyclic process for exploring new ideas and markets, understanding them well enough to compete, and simplifying a way of doing business to the point of mastering efficiencies.
This course will focus on developing storytelling skills to tell a story that motivates the listener to engage in a relationship with an idea. The course objective is to develop a skillset to advocate and move forward entrepreneurial ideas. This course will cover the fundamental aspects of entrepreneurial marketing.
This course will move beyond traditional marketing concepts of outbound marketing to inbound marketing techniques that follow customers through their journey by attracting and engaging people to grow a business that provides value and builds trust.
This is an experiential learning course with a primary focus on students drawing from their cumulative knowledge gained during their pursuit of an Entrepreneurship Minor, and demonstrating their proficiency by conceptualizing, planning, and preparing to launch a new venture, along with persuasively presenting their venture to stakeholders (including advisors, experienced entrepreneurs and potential investors). PEAK DESCRIPTION: The new venture is an integral part of the Peak experience, and it is capped with a final persuasive pitch to venture stakeholders including advisors, experienced entrepreneurs, and potential investors.
This course provides an opportunity for individual students to conduct in-depth study of a particular topic under the supervision of a faculty member. Contact the department or program chair for more information.