Executive Education

Description
Entrepreneurship drives innovation and economic growth. It enables new ideas, novel approaches, and innovative technologies to reach the marketplace. Entrepreneurship underlies the competitiveness and prosperity that characterize the U.S. economy and the economies of many other democratic societies.

The Entrepreneurship Development Program (EDP) leverages MIT's culture of high-tech entrepreneurship to help entrepreneurs, corporate venturing executives, and others involved in entrepreneurial environments learn what they need to develop ideas into successful businesses, and how to increase entrepreneurial opportunities in their corporations, institutions, and regions. The course introduces participants to MIT's technology transfer system, entrepreneurial educational programs, and entrepreneurial network that have created more than 5,000 firms (so far) with combined annual sales of over $200 billion.

In lectures, visits to high-tech start-ups, and live case studies with successful entrepreneurs, participants learn to identify and evaluate opportunities for new ventures, how the U.S. venture capital investment process works, and how the venture creation process may vary according to country. Understanding how to build new companies from corporate laboratories or university-based science and technologies is critical to this process.

The program covers the entire venture creation process from idea generation to building viable businesses, with special emphasis on the nurturing roles of corporations, universities, governments, and foundations. Using MIT's entrepreneurial culture as a model, participants learn what they need to know to make high-tech startups successful.

Who Should Attend
This program is designed for aspiring entrepreneurs, corporate venture officers, and persons who would like to develop or strengthen a climate of entrepreneurship in their corporations, universities, and regions. Teams of entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs are encouraged to attend the program together with university staff and/or development professionals from their region.

Faculty include:

Deborah Ancona, Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, is faculty director of the MIT Leadership Center. She is engaged in research examining core leadership capabilities. Her work includes the design and creation of leadership courses and workshops, a leadership model, and a 360-degree survey instrument.

Howard Anderson, founder of The Yankee Group and Co-Founder of Battery Venture Capital, teaches New Enterprises, Companies at the Crossroads, Managing in Adversity, and High Technology Sales and Sales Management. He has helped to create dozens of great companies including A123 Systems Inc., a spinoff from MIT.

William Aulet, Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Acting Director, MIT Entrepreneurship Center, is a serial entrepreneur who has run three companies, directly created hundreds of millions of dollars in market value, raised more than $100 million in funding for his companies, produced award-winning products, and helped develop numerous business leaders in his 25-year business career.

Steven D. Eppinger, General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has a joint appointment in MIT's Engineering Systems Division. His research creates new approaches to improve complex product development processes. This work has been applied primarily in the automotive, electronics, aerospace, and equipment industries. Co-author of Product Design and Development, the primary text for this course, Eppinger lectures regularly for international corporations and in executive education programs and has consulted for or conducted research with more than fifty organizations. He has worked as a manufacturing engineer, product designer, and consultant in both prototype and production operations. 

Scott Keating is a Senior Lecturer in Economics, Finance, & Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on understanding the internal workings of large and complex organizations. Keating is specifically interested in the role of internal accounting practices – such as accounting based performance measurement and compensation programs, transfer pricing policies, costing systems, and cost allocation practices – in regulating organizational activities. He teaches an undergraduate course in financial accounting and a second-year MBA elective in managerial accounting.

Richard Locke, the Alvin J. Siteman Professor of Entrepreneurship and Political Science, and Director of the MIT Italy Program, studies economic adjustment and development, comparative labor relations and political economy. His current work examines cooperative patterns of economic development in Eastern Germany, Southern Italy, and Northeast Brazil.

Matthew Marx, is Assistant Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at MIT Sloan. His current research focuses on the implications of employee non-compete agreements, which are ostensibly used to protect trade secrets but may also impact interorganizational and cross-regional mobility, utilization of expertise, and the ability of small companies to attract talent.

Alan MacCormack, is a visiting Associate Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research examines the management of innovation and new product development in high-technology industries, with a particular focus on the software sector.

Kenneth Morse,  Former Managing Director, MIT Entrepreneurship Center, has played a key role in launching several MIT-related high-tech startups, including 3Com Corporation; Aspen Technology, Inc.; a biotech company; and an expert systems firm. His expertise includes global sales and marketing strategies for new high-tech ventures and university-based technology entrepreneurship initiatives.

Fiona Murray, Senior Sarofim Family Career Development Professor and Associate Professor, Management of Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship, studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship including the campus-wide iTeams course developing "go-to-market" strategies for breakthrough innovations developed in MIT labs.

Michael Schrage is the senior advisor to MIT’s Security Studies Program, and a visiting professor at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology. He explores the behavioral economics of models, prototypes, and simulations in shaping innovation investment in the enterprise. His current research focuses on identifying emergent “perverse incentives” as organizations seek to transform increased “technical capacity” into greater organizational capability.

Duncan Simester, Associate Professor of Management Science, investigates marketing problems. His work on retail pricing investigates how customers form inferences from competitive prices from common marketing cues such as sale signs, price endings, installment billing offers and credit card logos.