Supporting the Spark: Educating Entrepreneurs

• In hands-on entrepreneurship courses, students learn how to generate ideas, assess the feasibility of new ventures, make successful pitches, and scale up their businesses.
• In addition to offering for-credit courses, business schools can support entrepreneurs through co-curricular activities such as workshops, community-building efforts, and financial awards.
• When successful alumni return to the classroom to teach entrepreneurship courses and lead workshops, they can help students link theory to real-world practice.

 
What makes an entrepreneur unstoppable? It’s not just ambition or a brilliant idea—it’s access to the right people, resources, and support at the right time.

That’s the conclusion I’ve come to over my 32-year career at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. As a professor, former vice dean of the undergraduate division, and now vice dean of entrepreneurship, I’ve met thousands of incredible entrepreneurs among our students and alumni. My involvement in their journeys has shown me that, to truly support aspiring founders, schools must build entrepreneurial ecosystems that go beyond the classroom curriculum. They must offer varied opportunities that mirror the messy, nonlinear journey of building something new.

It’s important that we offer this support to a wide range of aspiring business owners, because entrepreneurship is so much broader than media coverage would indicate. For instance, Wharton alum Jarrid Tingle is co-founder and managing partner of Harlem Capital, a venture capital firm dedicated to investing in diverse founders. While his business hasn’t received the same outsized attention as companies launched by legendary “tech bros,” he has faced the same challenges, developed the same mindset, and gone through many of the same experiences as these more well-known entrepreneurs.

In fact, those high-profile venture-backed success stories are rare. In reality, most entrepreneurs don’t chase unicorn valuations. Many build businesses with personal savings, help from friends and family, or traditional financing. Others pursue entrepreneurship by investing in new ventures, joining early-stage teams, or innovating from within established companies as intrapreneurs.

And while the media likes to celebrate successful founders who dropped out of college, many other entrepreneurs actively seek out educational support. Some choose to hone their skills in business school, while others pursue degrees in disciplines such as computer science, engineering, medicine, and design. That’s why I champion a “big tent” approach to teaching entrepreneurship—one that embraces a wide range of ventures, motivations, and disciplines.

I explore this broad view of entrepreneurship in my new book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: 7 Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value Through Innovation. In it, I identify seven types of entrepreneurs—Disruptors, Bootstrappers, Social Entrepreneurs, Tech Commercializers, Funders, Acquirers, and Intrapreneurs—and the vital roles they play in today’s innovation economy. Business schools can design classes and experiences that are valuable to all potential entrepreneurs, no matter which type they are.

Essential: Experiential Coursework

Many business schools already offer majors in entrepreneurship and innovation, while others embed related content into their more general management or strategy courses. These options provide students with research evidence about successful entrepreneurship, as well as frameworks for how to approach new ventures.

However, the best classroom experiences for aspiring entrepreneurs involve hands-on projects. Students can either devise their own innovative business ideas or work on others’ ideas before pitching those projects to fellow students or alumni.

By participating in real-world projects, current students help alumni grow their businesses and learn about the scaling phase of entrepreneurship.

For example, in Wharton’s elective entry-level entrepreneurship course, students learn how to generate ideas, assess feasibility, and make successful pitches. Students who want to pursue their venture ideas can take a follow-up course called Entrepreneurial Launchpad. There, they work on validating their ideas, gauging their ability to attract genuine customer interest, and gathering feedback to incubate and refine their early concepts.

In our Venture Acceleration Lab course, we bring in representatives from alumni startups that already have well-defined products and receptive markets. We consider the class to be similar to a “surgical theater” in which medical students witness operations being performed by doctors.

Current students learn about the challenges of later-stage scaling as they observe and work with seasoned entrepreneurs from more advanced enterprises. Ultimately, the ideas generated for these growing ventures are pitched to rooms full of judges, potential board members, and investors.

By participating in these projects, current students get a chance to practice real-world skills. At the same time, they help alumni grow their businesses and learn about the scaling phase of entrepreneurship. This gives them experience that extends well beyond the ideation and testing of their own early-stage ventures.

By first gaining an understanding of entrepreneurship frameworks and research, and then having the opportunity to apply that knowledge to real-world businesses, students learn to be adaptable, responsive to feedback, and resilient in the face of crises. That is, they begin developing entrepreneurial mindsets.

Supercharged: Co-Curricular Activities

Such mindsets will be invaluable as students continue along their entrepreneurial journeys. I refer to the specific capabilities that founders need as “The Six Rs”—reason, recombination, resources, resilience, relationships, and results.

But students can’t cultivate these skills and capabilities through credit-bearing courses alone. In addition to providing students with opportunities to work on real-world projects, business schools must offer a suite of noncredit, complementary options that build community and give students additional chances to practice and learn.

Students can’t cultivate entrepreneurial skills through credit-bearing courses alone. Schools must offer a suite of noncredit options that give students additional chances to learn.

I serve as Wharton’s faculty director for Venture Lab, which is Penn’s home for student entrepreneurs. Here, we offer 25 programs for students across the university who are interested in founding, acquiring, joining, investing in, or just exploring entrepreneurial ventures. Through a mix of workshops, advice, mentoring, community-building activities, and financial awards, we provide experiential learning opportunities for students at any stage of their entrepreneurial journeys:

• Students with promising ventures can participate in the flagship Venture Initiation Program, an accelerator. Students with newer ventures can use our incubator to prepare for the accelerator. They also can attend networking events to meet potential funders and find other students who might want to become early employees.
• Students interested in investing can join our Penn Wharton Innovation Fund, which distributes monetary awards to deserving ventures. Those who are more focused on advising can participate in our Snider Consulting Program.
• First- and second-year undergraduates can apply for our Bet on Entrepreneurship program, which offers training and internships with alumni-owned venture capital firms.
• Students who want to devote more attention to entrepreneurial pursuits can participate in our annual Startup Challenge Pitch Competition, Summer Venture Awards, and Summer Internship Awards, all of which provide financial awards.
• Finally, students who plan to pursue their ventures full-time after graduation can apply for Bridge Awards. These living stipends are especially important for those who do not have family safety nets.

Connected: Alumni as Growth Partners

For business schools that want to build entrepreneurial ecosystems, alumni entrepreneurs are a powerful—and often underleveraged—resource. Many business schools already invite alumni to teach courses, lead workshops, or involve students in their ventures. But when schools intentionally connect alumni and students around shared entrepreneurial energy, they create a self-sustaining loop: Alumni give back with their time, experience, and capital, while students gain insight, access, and inspiration.

A kind of magic happens when alumni entrepreneurs speak to, advise, and directly engage with students. Their real-world experience adds depth to course content and interest to co-curricular programs. In addition, their presence helps overcome a constant challenge that schools face: The demand for one-on-one advising, feedback, and mentoring far exceeds the supply. Alumni don’t just enhance the learning experience—they expand its reach.

A kind of magic happens when alumni entrepreneurs speak to, advise, and directly engage with students. Their experience adds depth to course content and interest to co-curricular programs.

When alumni visit the classroom to share their stories, faculty should use these stories to illustrate how theory is connected to practice. I recommend that professors open with curated questions that link course concepts to the alum’s journey, then turn the class over to students for a Q&A session. It’s best if faculty can leave informal time toward the end, because students will almost always line up to take selfies with alumni and ask them for advice.

Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa, two of the four co-founders of the eyeglass company Warby Parker, are prime examples of the benefits of maintaining sustained alumni engagement. They launched their business in 2010 at Wharton, fine-tuning their vision with the help of faculty and peer feedback. Today, they return regularly to give lectures, advise student founders, and recruit interns and grads who share their entrepreneurial mindset.

Educators, Not Investors

As business schools deepen their support for entrepreneurship, it’s essential to draw a clear line between enabling ventures and investing in them. At Wharton, we believe our role is to provide students with the frameworks, guidance, and networks they need to navigate their entrepreneurial journeys—not to profit from the outcomes of student enterprises.

We don’t take equity positions in student ventures or blur the lines between faculty support and financial interest because we don’t want to compromise academic integrity and trust. Instead, we connect students with early-stage investors and other external funding sources. Similarly, all our financial awards are nondilutive, meaning we do not take equity stakes.

Our goal is to create conditions where students can learn, experiment, and grow, free from pressure or perceived bias. When we focus on education over investment, we make room for a wider range of founders to thrive. That’s how we help build not just more startups, but more unstoppable entrepreneurs.