In 1947, Professor Myles Mace, a pioneer in the study of entrepreneurship and corporate governance, introduced a unique offering into the MBA curriculum called The Management of New Enterprises. Believed to be the first entrepreneurship course taught at any school in the United States, it became the foundation of HBS’s entrepreneurial management program.

Since then, students interested in developing their own for-profit or nonprofit startups have come to the School to gain the skills, insight, and practical experience necessary to turn great ideas into viable ventures. HBS’s emphasis on furthering the entrepreneurial passions of its students has led to the creation of some 25 courses, research that has informed 1,300 cases, and the growth of a wide range of resources that support innovators both inside and outside of the MBA classroom. Within 10 to 20 years of graduating, a Harvard survey notes, more than half of HBS alumni launch a business.

In this conversation, professors Tom Eisenmann and Bill Kerr discuss HBS’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, which empowers students to create an enterprise that has impact. Eisenmann is chair of the Harvard Innovation Labs, faculty co-chair of both the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship and Harvard’s MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences Program, and founder of HBS’s Startup Bootcamp. Kerr is unit head of Entrepreneurial Management and faculty chair of the Launching New Ventures Program in Executive Education.

How have you seen entrepreneurship evolve in the years you’ve been teaching at HBS?

Tom Eisenmann: In the past 25 years, the Entrepreneurial Management academic unit, the group in which Bill and I work, has grown to include more than 30 faculty members who are engaged in entrepreneurship-related research and teaching. The entrepreneurship courses have evolved from being all case-based to include those that are learning-by-doing, project-based courses. That’s particularly important for training future entrepreneurs so that they can practice the necessary skills.

What has also expanded is the number of resources available to students, such as the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, which launched in 2003, followed by the Harvard Innovation Labs in 2011. We’re now 25 years into the annual New Venture Competition sponsored by the Rock Center and the Social Enterprise Initiative, and we’ve continued to layer on more programming over the years. The third component is our ability to draw on alumni achievement along these lines. HBS has a long list of distinguished alumni who are or have been entrepreneurs.

Why is it important for a general management graduate school such as HBS to offer a wide range of entrepreneurship electives and even a required course, The Entrepreneurial Manager?

Bill Kerr: There’s a lot of alignment between general management and entrepreneurial management. We define entrepreneurship following the early work of Howard Stevenson at HBS as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled.” What entrepreneurs and their teams need to accomplish is basically everything that the business needs, from raising financing, to customer interactions, to sales and marketing, to product development. It’s a challenge to be able to cover, as an individual and even as a small team, all those bases, and know the things that you need to invest in, know how to hire people to help you in areas, work with resource providers, and so forth. So, there’s a natural dovetailing between HBS’s focus on general management and entrepreneurship. Even if students are not going to ultimately start a venture, they are able to learn a lot about leading teams. We’ve also seen entrepreneurship flourish in many sectors, expanding beyond just the software, high-tech type of startup, into financial services and the future of blockchain, for example. We want to support people going into many different spaces during the course of their careers and think about not just optimizing their capability to start a business six months from now, but also prepare them to think through entry decisions that will happen down the road.

HBS introduced into the curriculum the Startup Bootcamp to give students the opportunity to explore their entrepreneurial interests and gain hands-on knowledge. How is it structured?

Tom Eisenmann: Students in Startup Bootcamp work on a venture concept in a small team and pitch it to outside experts, so it’s the learning-by-doing complement to the conceptual foundations they acquire in the case-based course The Entrepreneurial Manager. There are many individuals who have an idea and a passion to extend it, but because we want the projects to have some scale, we insist on teams of three or four, which means they have to recruit teammates. A number of these teammates are essentially kicking the tires of a startup experience without necessarily intending to stay with that idea or that team. But some of those teams do stay together afterwards, as is often the case with the MS/MBA version of bootcamp called Tech Venture Immersion.

Speaking of the MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences Program, how did that evolve?

Tom Eisenmann: We knew from working with a number of very tech-focused MBAs that they felt like they were drifting away from technology while they were getting their MBA and were going to lose an edge. Because of this, we wondered whether there would be demand for a joint degree program with the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences for innovators who aspired to launch and lead technology ventures. We did extensive primary research, including focus groups with students in our MBA Program who looked like they might have been interested in this kind of opportunity. About half said they would have done such a program, so we knew there would be enough interest. We’ve admitted about 30 students per cohort each year since the two-year program began in 2018. It’s been exciting to watch these students settle into the new Science and Engineering Complex, which is right across the street from the Harvard Innovation Labs and adjacent to Harvard’s planned Enterprise Research Campus, the future home of company labs, startups, and venture capital firms that will supercharge our innovation ecosystem. All of this is just a stone’s throw away from the HBS campus.

In addition to the academic experience, how do all of the resources available to students at HBS further their entrepreneurial aspirations?

Tom Eisenmann: At any top university you’ll see a similar set of resources but I think we’re best in class. Harvard had been siloed by school, and the Harvard i-lab, which opened in 2011 and evolved into the Harvard Innovation Labs ecosystem, was one of the first things that very deliberately cut across these boundaries. It’s a resource that serves all the schools, and we see some wonderful cross-fertilization there as students come together to work on ventures. At the Rock Center, we have about 16 Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, mostly alumni, who offer office hours for the students. And, like the New Venture Competition, the University-wide President’s Innovation Challenge gives participants the opportunity to practice their pitches, get feedback from industry leaders, and win financial awards. In addition, the Rock Summer Fellowships provide funding for students to either further their entrepreneurial ideas or to subsidize their salaries if they intern at a very early-stage startup that can’t yet afford to pay market rates. For some qualifying students, the Rock Loan Forgiveness Program helps reduce their debt burden after graduation.

How instrumental is the HBS alumni network of founders in providing mentorship and even financing for students interested in creating their own ventures?

Bill Kerr: We have alumni who are playing important roles on both the founder and the investor sides of enterprises. The Rock 100 Initiative—a network of founders of early-stage, high-impact ventures—brings together many of them to discuss critical issues they’re facing, and faculty are a part of those conversations. Our alumni who have founded and scaled successful companies have been very willing to come back and be a part of our classes, interact with the MBA students, and talk about the struggles they’ve had as entrepreneurs and how they’ve overcome them. It’s also important to note the deep degree to which the venture capital industry has been linked to HBS over the years, and the significant number of our students who have gone on to work in that industry.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are key priorities at HBS. How are these issues reflected in the School’s entrepreneurship ecosystem in terms of women and underserved groups?

Bill Kerr: In our first-year course, The Entrepreneurial Manager, just over half of the cases focus on companies founded and led by women, many of whom are HBS graduates. We’ve also been expanding our portfolio of cases with underrepresented minorities as case protagonists, and introduced into the Elective Curriculum a field course taught by Henry McGee, Archie Jones, and Jeff Bussgang called Scaling Minority Businesses. Additionally, the African American Student Union hosts the annual Black New Venture Competition to help early-stage Black entrepreneurs further their business concepts.

Tom Eisenmann: If you examine a sample of venture capital-backed startups, you’ll find that around 10 percent have a female founder. I estimate the number of HBS alumnae founders runs around 25 percent, which is somewhere between VC industry norms and the current HBS class composition of about 46 percent women. There’s more we can do, but we have fantastic role models who have had a stream of big wins. For underrepresented groups, that’s where our clubs have a huge impact. Most have an annual conference, supported by faculty, with speakers and panels, and each conference typically has a series of entrepreneurship-focused sessions that give students the chance to make connections.

Why should nascent entrepreneurs pursue an MBA at HBS?

Bill Kerr: The two main levers we use in the MBA classroom are the case study methodology and the learning-by-doing experiential work in which we’ve made great investments. What the School does very well is bring to life issues that entrepreneurs are going to face throughout their journey and the ways in which they can best approach those challenges.

Tom Eisenmann: When I speak to prospective students, I actually don’t “sell” our entrepreneurship-related activities, which are amazing. What I talk about is the Business School: the section experience, the case method, and the fact that class attendance is required, and therefore students are engaged. Those are the real drivers of the learning here. Our entrepreneurship courses and our programs are fantastic, but if we weren’t building on the base of the overall MBA experience, they wouldn’t be nearly as powerful.

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