Student Ryan LaFlamme listens to a judge's feedback during the Fowler Business Concept Challenge November 20, 2015 in Schulze Hall.

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Graduate Courses

Develop Your Entrepreneurial Mindset

Learning to think like an entrepreneur isn’t just for people who want to start a business. Entrepreneurial skills benefit everyone. Whether you want to create a startup or innovate in a corporate setting, the Schulze School offers the graduate courses you’re looking for.

Contact

Danielle Campeau, DBA

Associate Dean of the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship

danielle.campeau@stthomas.edu

Phone Number

(651) 962-4409

Entrepreneurial Thinking

This brief introductory course is designed to help the general manager learn to identify and evaluate new opportunities, and understand how to transform innovations into profitable businesses. In this course, begin to develop key skills and knowledge necessary for applying the entrepreneurial process in a corporate context.

New Venture Finance

Learn to develop financial strategies for various types of businesses. Explore issues related to debt vs. equity financing, sources of financing, advanced financial projections, managing cash flow gap, determining business valuation and using equity in partner and employee compensation. As part of the course, you will create a financing presentation and negotiate financing with a lender or investor. Prerequisites: ACCT 601 and FINC 600

Launching New Ventures

This course explores how to launch new ventures capable of sustained growth over time. Learn about the development of marketing, operating, and financing strategies to guide early stages of a startup, or in managing small and medium-sized businesses. Course curriculum is organized around the components of an effective business plan.

Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is the practice of identifying, designing, starting and growing successful mission-driven ventures. These include both “non-profit” and for-profit enterprises designed to respond to a specific social need, as well as more traditional ventures working to incorporate ‘socially-responsible’ practices into their business models. The course provides an overview of the processes, challenges and demands of creating ventures that seek to integrate financial and social/environmental benchmarks of success.

Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship

This courses is for entrepreneurs, managers and consultants interested in creating and reinforcing entrepreneurial responses within established organizations. Learn how managers affect the nature and rate of innovation through organizational culture, structure, communication, reward and control systems. Course integrates theory and practice through readings, discussions, cases, field work and projects.

Family Business Management

Learn to identify, develop and organize family resources for business ownership and for other family initiatives, such as philanthropy and community service. Family resources include family aptitudes, knowledge, experience, skills, identity and culture. Methods for organizing family initiatives include defining family mission, values, and goals. The course will also cover establishing guidelines/policies, and developing governance and decision-making structures, including boards of directors or advisors. Prerequisite: Junior standing.

Featured Faculty

Jay Ebben, PhD

Assistant Professor in Entrepreneurship

In addition to teaching courses in entrepreneurial finance, business development and small business management, Jay Ebben advises the Practicing Entrepreneurs group. In 2010, Ebben won the Julie Hays Teaching Award in the Opus College of Business. In 2011, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to teach in Slovenia in 2011, where he has returned each summer to lead an entrepreneurship program sponsored by AMCHAM and the U.S. Embassy. He has started several businesses and has worked with entrepreneurs at many stages of business development. He earned his B.S. in industrial engineering from Marquette University and his MBA and PhD in entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

David Deeds, PhD

Professor in Entrepreneurship

In addition serving on the St. Thomas faculty, David Deeds is an award-winning entrepreneur. He was awarded the NASDAQ Fellowship in Capital Formation and named a research fellow at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship. In 2007, Deeds was awarded the Haniel Fellowship in Entrepreneurship at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. His current research interests include new venture growth and adaptation, technological discontinuities and technology commercialization.

John McVea, PhD

Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship

John McVea researches and teaches entrepreneurial strategy and social entrepreneurship. His work had been published in The Journal of Business Venturing and The Journal of Business Ethics, among others. He’s written over a dozen business case studies about issues such as market entry strategy, innovation field studies, cash flow forecasting, challenges of growth and the use of social media.

See All Schulze Faculty