Expanding Undergraduate Opportunities for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Studies
Entrepreneurship is not an autonomous discipline or a field unto itself. It is a behavior of learning—a set of principles, a mindset—crossing all disciplines that can be broadly defined as a directed application of innovation, in short, the method by which ideas receive a concrete reality. According to the Kauffman Foundation, “Entrepreneurship is ideal for general education because it is a practice that applies to many fields and because it provides a revealing lens for studying how cultural values, social institutions, economic policies, and legal practices interrelate to shape human behavior.”(14) For the past decade, Boston University has provided an award-winning undergraduate concentration in entrepreneurship for students enrolled at the School of Management. More recently, the School of Management has been partnering with the College of Engineering to develop a technology entrepreneurship track designed specifically for undergraduate engineering students. The University may now be poised to further integrate the principles of innovation and entrepreneurship into undergraduate programs across the campus as a way of training students to take ownership of and develop their ideas, regardless of the field, learn to assess risk, understand the economics and potential in any project, and build their fields of expertise on top of a sustainable model.
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