New Enterprises covers the process of identifying and quantifying market opportunities, then conceptualizing, planning, and starting a new, technology-based enterprise.

Topics include opportunity assessment, the value proposition, the entrepreneur, legal issues, entrepreneurial ethics, the business plan, the founding team, seeking customers and raising funds. Students develop detailed business plans for a start-up.

Intended for students who want to start their own business, further develop an existing business, be a member of a management team in a new enterprise, or better understand the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial process.

N. Teng

C. Madsen

B. Aulet

Professor of the Practice

Entrepreneurship 101: Systematic Approach to New Venture Creation

GSD is an intensive, project-based course and is the most advanced for-credit class in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation track.  It is designed for any startup team across campus who is already working on building a new, high-impact venture.  Teams will learn to apply advanced entrepreneurial techniques to build and iterate their venture over the course of the semester in a time-compressed manner, in a respectful community of peers and with intensive 1 on 1 coaching.  

You’re a good match for Track #2 if your team:
- have been working on this venture together for at least one semester;
- have taken “New Enterprises” 15.390;
- have run tactical experiments, and have implemented metrics based on these experiments.

Teams in Track #2 are looking for accountability, a small cohort setting, and motivation to push your venture forward at a rapid pace while dealing with the typical noise and distractions of a semester.

Track #2 consists of weekly lessons, class discussions, homework, and 1:1 mentorship.
- All teams interested in being part of Track #2 will pitch their ventures on Monday, September 13th.
- Only 6 teams will be accepted following these pitches.
- At least two team members from your venture must be available to participate in the class.
- No solo founders may take part in Track #2.

If interested in GSD, please apply here - https://orbit.mit.edu/applications/gsdfall2023

More information here: https://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/an-inside-look-at-gsd/

GSD is an intensive, project-based course and is the most advanced for-credit class in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation track.  It is designed for any startup team across campus who is already working on building a new, high-impact venture.  Teams will learn to apply advanced entrepreneurial techniques to build and iterate their venture over the course of the semester in a time-compressed manner, in a respectful community of peers and with intensive 1 on 1 coaching.  

You’re a good match for Track #2 if your team:
- have been working on this venture together for at least one semester;
- have taken “New Enterprises” 15.390;
- have run tactical experiments, and have implemented metrics based on these experiments.

Teams in Track #2 are looking for accountability, a small cohort setting, and motivation to push your venture forward at a rapid pace while dealing with the typical noise and distractions of a semester.

Track #2 consists of weekly lessons, class discussions, homework, and 1:1 mentorship.
- All teams interested in being part of Track #2 will pitch their ventures 
- Only 6 teams will be accepted following these pitches.
- At least two team members from your venture must be available to participate in the class.
- No solo founders may take part in Track #2.

If interested in GSD, please apply here:
https://orbit.mit.edu home page - upcoming applications

GSD applications typically open early May for the Fall
And open in October for the Spring semester

More information here: 
https://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/an-inside-look-at-gsd/

K. Ligris

Senior Lecturer

Building an Entrepreneurial Venture: Advanced Tools and Techniques (GSD)

This subject is the entry-point for any MIT Sloan MBA student excited to learn more about entrepreneurship and engage with the  E&I  Track during their time at  Sloan. E&I  students are typically interested in: founding a company, joining a start-up venture, evaluating start-up ventures, becoming a corporate entrepreneur within a larger organization, or simply wanting to learn more about entrepreneurship.  

The subject has three learning objectives: 

1) MIT Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Introduces you to the broader MIT ecosystem and provides an overview of the abundant opportunities to collaborate across campus and gain help with your own ventures.

2) Entrepreneurial Skills: Introduces you to how to gain the knowledge and tactical skills needed in entrepreneurship, which will be invaluable whether you start, join, or evaluate a startup venture.

3) Your Entrepreneurial  Journey: Provides an overview of the various ways to found, grow, and accelerate a venture during your time at MIT and beyond. 

This subject is the entry-point for any MIT Sloan MBA student excited to learn more about entrepreneurship and engage with the  E&I  Track during their time at  Sloan. E&I  students are typically interested in: founding a company, joining a start-up venture, evaluating start-up ventures, becoming a corporate entrepreneur within a larger organization, or simply wanting to learn more about entrepreneurship.  

The subject has three learning objectives: 

1) MIT Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Introduces you to the broader MIT ecosystem and provides an overview of the abundant opportunities to collaborate across campus and gain help with your own ventures.

2) Entrepreneurial Skills: Introduces you to how to gain the knowledge and tactical skills needed in entrepreneurship, which will be invaluable whether you start, join, or evaluate a startup venture.

3) Your Entrepreneurial  Journey: Provides an overview of the various ways to found, grow, and accelerate a venture during your time at MIT and beyond. 

[Application for the 15.360HC Cohort](https://tinyurl.com/MIT-15-360-HC)  (must already be enrolled in 15.360 to fill this out).

Entrepreneurship & Innovation Proseminar

15.366 MIT Energy & Climate Ventures is a project- and lecture-based course in which teams create a new business in the energy sector. The goal of Energy Ventures is to educate entrepreneurs through hands-on practical experience. 

Teams of engineering, policy, and business students are paired with technologies from MIT and surrounding labs to determine the best path for commercialization. These teams then spend the fall semester building their business plans.This advanced entrepreneurship course goes beyond general entrepreneurial concepts to address special challenges faced in the clean energy and related industries.

The class gathers cross-disciplinary skills (technology, business, policy, law, etc.) to form teams around new technologies emerging out of several of MIT’s labs. Over the course of the semester, students will work with their team to build out the venture’s business and market-launch efforts. 

The class has spun out over 30 ventures over the last ten years, with many achieving significant market traction. Sectors include:

-energy & power
-transportation & mobility
-agriculture & food
-carbon sequestration & resources/environmental
-advanced materials & chemicals and 
-enabling technologies 

This course is one of the most popular in the nation for student-driven energy entrepreneurship, and it carries with it the spirit of the MIT Innovation Initiative and leverages the resources of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

Energy Ventures teams have performed exceptionally well in business plan competitions after the class has completed (including the MIT Clean Energy Prize, the MIT $100K Business Plan Competition, and the energy track of the Rice Business Plan Competition. OptiBit (now Ayar Labs), founded through the course in 2014-2015, won the 2015 MIT Clean Energy Prize.

For interested students, please fill out this “MIT Climate & Energy Ventures Interest Form”:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSftPsjtQNRq8BuE4OT00MPOEpppU5zLprxiHkPDmnoZkpxnJg/viewform

Fall 2023 applications have been received and the application form has been closed as of August 5th, 2023. All applications are currently being reviewed and decisions will be communicated during the week of August 14th, 2023.

15.366 MIT Energy & Climate Ventures is a project- and lecture-based course in which teams create a new business in the energy sector. The goal of Energy Ventures is to educate entrepreneurs through hands-on practical experience. 

Teams of engineering, policy, and business students are paired with technologies from MIT and surrounding labs to determine the best path for commercialization. These teams then spend the fall semester building their business plans.This advanced entrepreneurship course goes beyond general entrepreneurial concepts to address special challenges faced in the clean energy and related industries.

The class gathers cross-disciplinary skills (technology, business, policy, law, etc.) to form teams around new technologies emerging out of several of MIT’s labs. Over the course of the semester, students will work with their team to build out the venture’s business and market-launch efforts. 

The class has spun out over 30 ventures over the last ten years, with many achieving significant market traction. Sectors include:

-energy & power
-transportation & mobility
-agriculture & food
-carbon sequestration & resources/environmental
-advanced materials & chemicals and 
-enabling technologies 

This course is one of the most popular in the nation for student-driven energy entrepreneurship, and it carries with it the spirit of the MIT Innovation Initiative and leverages the resources of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

Energy Ventures teams have performed exceptionally well in business plan competitions after the class has completed (including the MIT Clean Energy Prize, the MIT $100K Business Plan Competition, and the energy track of the Rice Business Plan Competition. OptiBit (now Ayar Labs), founded through the course in 2014-2015, won the 2015 MIT Clean Energy Prize.

[ChatCEV](https://tinyurl.com/chat-climate) - is the chatbot created for MIT's Climate & Energy Ventures class.  To learn more about this class "ask ChatCEV".

[Mentor List](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N1NOW1A6Ru32efXDj3qjXig3ohmlj2r9uclLFDrcmsI/edit?usp=sharing) - for 15.366 Students

T. Hynes

Climate & Energy Ventures

This course is designed for students who aspire to shape the future of mobility. The course explores technological, behavioral, policy and systems-wide frameworks for innovation in transportation systems, complemented with case studies across the mobility spectrum, from autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility to last-mile sidewalk robots. Students will interact with a series of guest lecturers from CEOs and other business and government executives who are actively reshaping the future of mobility. Interdisciplinary teams of 5 students will work to deliver business plans for startups or action plans for solving “real world” challenges in established companies, governments or NGOs.

J. Zhao

Professor

Mobility Ventures: Driving Innovation in Transportation Systems

“40 years ago when I joined IBM one of the parts of the program they put us through in the training program was “sales”. I will never forget it and it was incredibly helpful through my career. It was training us how to sell multi-million dollar mainframe computers.”
-Bill Aulet
 
In 1998 Howard Anderson started one of the first Sales courses at a business school at MIT Sloan from the same center of gravity. The course has continued built off this foundation and been one of the most successful courses at MIT. However, as we look at the course and the challenges that business leaders are facing, we’ve seen just how much the revenue landscape has transformed. With that, we’ve taken an opportunity to evolve the class beyond how to be a better sales person or manager to instead focus on how to be a Chief Revenue Officer.
 
The course will still cover integral sales skills, but will revolve around four fundamental Go-To-Market business models and will explore how a CRO can identify, build and execute on the right model for their business. This includes not only building out a sales organization, but also the underlying tech stack and revenue operations required to measure results and sustain competitive advantage. Each class will cover the relevant core first principles per topic and include an industry expert speaker to provide context and share valuable lessons learned throughout their careers. This course is highly relevant to anyone interested in building a business or better understanding how to drive revenue at scale.

A. Blake

Entrepreneurial Sales

In order to be successful, an entrepreneur and their founding team must not only be able to create and deliver value to a segment of customers, but also must be able to build an effective organization in order to sustainably do so.  The course centers on the key organizational and strategic decisions in founding and building a new venture. It aims to inform students on the trade-offs and consequences of these early decisions on the founders, their team, and the venture’s performance and to equip them with tools to navigate these complex organizational challenges more effectively.  Though the primary decision maker in the course will be a member of the founding team, the perspective of early-hires and investors will also be taken to understand the broader implications of the founder’s decisions on the venture.

The course is a complement to New Enterprises (15.390) and Entrepreneurial Strategy (15.911), as well as the entrepreneurship courses and activities in the broader MIT Sloan and Trust Center ecosystem. This course is designed to be particularly appropriate for those considering:

• Founding a new venture
• Joining an early-stage start-up
• Evaluating start-ups (and founding teams)

The course is highly interactive. It combines lectures, case analyses, activities, and direct engagement with start-up founders and their teams. The course is divided into three parts:

1) Co-Founding a Venture: What is it actually like to be a founder? How should you choose a co-founder? How do you decide on roles? Is there a correct way to split equity and craft a founders’ agreement?
 
2) Establishing an Early Team: How should an early-stage venture approach sequencing early hires? How do you determine if a startup is a good fit for you to join? How do you have the difficult conversations necessary to manage a startup team? How do you effectively build out an organization? How do you coach your employees? And, when necessary, fire them?

3) Growing Your Venture: How should your entrepreneurial identity and motivations affect the investment choices you make? Who should you choose (and not choose) as your investors? How do you work productively with your board? When and how will you leave your company?

E. Scott

Entrepreneurial Founding and Teams

Experiential study of the climate for innovation and determinants of entrepreneurial success. Students work in teams of four with the top management of a company to address real-world business challenges. Students gain insight as to how companies build, run, and scale a new enterprise. Focuses primarily on scale-ups operating in emerging markets. Restricted to MBA students; all other graduate students by permission of instructor only.

M. Jester

Senior Lecturer and G-Lab Course Manager

Global Entrepreneurship Lab

Experiential study of the innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Middle East and North Africa leveraging on the historic Abraham Accords. Explores the role of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, MNCs, universities, and governments. Teaches the McKinsey process for successful consulting engagements and what makes for high performing teams. Students travel to the Middle East during IAP to work with and consult for host companies on strategic managerial issues in tech industries. Includes an opportunity to work with executives at startup ventures looking to scale their businesses and to engage with their venture capitalist backers.

J. Cohen

Senior Lecturer, Accounting,Ethics & Law

Israel Lab: Startup Nation's Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem

Entrepreneurship 101: Systematic Approach to New Venture Creation (formerly New Enterprises) covers the process of identifying and quantifying market opportunities, then conceptualizing, planning, and starting a new, technology-based enterprise.

Topics include opportunity assessment, the value proposition, the entrepreneur, legal issues, entrepreneurial ethics, the business plan, the founding team, seeking customers and raising funds. Students develop detailed business plans for a start-up.

Intended for students who want to start their own business, further develop an existing business, be a member of a management team in a new enterprise, or better understand the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial process.

Group study of current topics related to management not otherwise included in curriculum.

IDEA Lab

The legal framework of entrepreneurship and innovation. Key law-sensitive junctures in launching and growing a startup: assembling a team, organizing a business entity, ownership and compensation, early financing, managing contracts and employees, business distress and winding down, and selling a company.  Cutting-edge technologies and intellectual property rights. Designed for those who may start or work in such ventures; or are engaged in research with potential for commercial or social impact; or are otherwise attempting to advance an innovation from idea to impact. Meets with 15.6181 when offered concurrently. Expectations and evaluation criteria differ for students taking graduate version.

J. Akula

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Startups and the Law

What skills will I develop in this class?

1. You will gain greater self-awareness. 

Self-awareness is a starting point for leadership development and an essential capability for the exercise of effective leadership. Some of the related skills that we will learn include building emotional intelligence, understanding how personalities shape leadership behaviors, defining personal and ethical values, giving and receiving feedback, coping with change and ambiguity, and managing stress.

2. You will learn to build positive relationships by enhancing your interpersonal skills.

Leadership and teamwork are inherently relational activities and strong interpersonal skills are therefore important enablers. During the course, you will develop related skills in managing conflict and negotiation, motivating and inspiring others, communicating effectively, building positive relationships and networks, building sources of power, and exercising influence.  

3. You will develop your ability to lead a team and be an effective team member.

Our focus on teamwork will center on both leadership and followership as essentially interdependent. Examples of related skills we will learn include how to compose and launch new teams, how to create and communicate an inspiring vision, how to develop groups into real teams, how to empower group members and delegate roles and responsibilities, and how to conduct productive team post mortems.

4. You will learn how to develop creative solutions in team environments. 

The unique context of teams in this class will be “creative” ones – groups that are charged with developing novel and useful solutions to problems. In this class, you will learn several creative problem solving skills, including how to understand problems from different points of views, how to find commonalities among disconnected fields or domains, how to open-up new ways of thinking about problems, and how to create a motivating environment that fosters creative problem solving.

What will the class be like?

This will not be a purely lecture-based course. While we will review and discuss readings to build our knowledge of course topics and skills, we will also draw from many learning methods, including:

Self-assessments to measure current skill competence and opportunities for development.
Case studies to see examples of how skills are applied in real leadership situations.
Role plays and simulations to practice skills in class and receive feedback from others.
Reflective learning through the crafting of an autobiography.
Visits from guest speakers and interviews with leaders in your chosen areas.

D. Nino

Senior Lecturer, GradEL

Leading Creative Teams

Introduction and overview of engineering management. Financial principles, management of innovation, technical strategy and best management practices. Case study method of instruction emphasizes participation in class discussion. Focus is on the development of individual skills and management tools. Restricted to juniors and seniors.

J. Chun

Management in Engineering

Enhances students' ability to take effective action in complex organizational settings by providing the analytic tools needed to analyze, manage, and lead the organizations of the future. Emphasizes the importance of the organizational context in influencing which individual styles and skills are effective. Employs a wide variety of learning tools, from experiential learning to the more conventional discussion of written cases. Centers on three complementary perspectives on organizations: the structural design, political, and cultural "lenses" on organizations. Major project analyzes an actual organizational change using course frameworks. Restricted to first-year Sloan master's students.

C. Lide

N. Wilmers

D. White

Assistant Professor

Associate Professor

Organizational Processes

Overview of the global airline industry, focusing on recent industry performance, current issues and challenges for the future. Fundamentals of airline industry structure, airline economics, operations planning, safety, labor relations, airports and air traffic control, marketing, and competitive strategies, with an emphasis on the interrelationships among major industry stakeholders. Recent research findings of the MIT Global Airline Industry Program are showcased, including the impacts of congestion and delays, evolution of information technologies, changing human resource management practices, and competitive effects of new entrant airlines. Taught by faculty participants of the Global Airline Industry Program.

F. Allroggen

The Airline Industry

Addresses the architecting of air transportation systems. Focuses on the conceptual phase of product definition including technical, economic, market, environmental, regulatory, legal, manufacturing, and societal factors. Centers on a realistic system case study and includes a number of lectures from industry and government. Past examples include the Very Large Transport Aircraft, a Supersonic Business Jet and a Next Generation Cargo System. Identifies the critical system level issues and analyzes them in depth via student team projects and individual assignments. Overall goal is to produce a business plan and a system specifications document that can be used to assess candidate systems.

R. Hansman

Air Transportation Systems Architecting

Detailed historical and technical study of the Space Shuttle, the world's first reusable spacecraft, through lectures by the people who designed, built and operated it. Examines the political, economic and military factors that influenced the design of the Shuttle; looks deeply into the it's many subsystems; and explains how the Shuttle was operated. Lectures are both live and on video. Students work on a final project related to space vehicle design.

J. Hoffman

Engineering the Space Shuttle

Focuses around the premise that the abilities to negotiate with, and influence others, are essential to being an effective leader in technology rich environments. Provides graduate students with underlying principles and a repertoire of negotiation and influence skills that apply to interpersonal situations, particularly those where an engineer or project leader lacks formal authority over others in delivering results. Utilizes research-based approaches through the application of multiple learning methods, including experiential role plays, case studies, assessments, feedback, and personal reflections. Concepts such as the zone of possible agreements, best alternative to negotiated agreements, and sources of influence are put into practice. Satisfies the requirements for the Graduate Certificate in Technical Leadership. 

R. Best

Lecturer, GradEL

Negotiation and Influence Skills for Technical Leaders

What if your biggest leadership gaps were sabotaging your team’s motivation? Or if time pressure was silently killing your startup’s creativity? This course dives into counterintuitive, evidence-based insights from psychology and translates them into practical tools for success.

You’ll learn how to sustain your own well-being, foster a high-performance culture, and build resilient teams. Through hands-on projects, you’ll experiment with over 60 science-backed habits for thriving under pressure, maintaining momentum, and amplifying others’ success. We’ll pair this with practical data science and Generative AI techniques to help you validate ideas, test assumptions, and communicate results clearly.

You’ll also strengthen your ability to propose, persuade, and lead—through writing, visualization, and presentation.

Instruction and practice in oral and written communication provided. Students complete a group project in the last ¼ of the course.
