The Innovator is an introduction to the core concepts related to entrepreneurship and innovation. In this course, we study and discuss the attitudes, frameworks, knowledge, and skills necessary to be innovative and entrepreneurial. Although the concepts we discuss generalize to innovation and entrepreneurship in a variety of contexts and applications, they are best learned through practice. Students apply the frameworks—as they learn them—as part of an entrepreneurial team launching a new venture. The class is taught using a multifaceted approach, with a mixture of exercises, cases, lectures, and discussions. The topics covered include: idea generation and evaluation, forming and testing key hypotheses, customer and market dynamics, teams and human capital, finance, developing ideas inside the firm versus as a new venture, and strategy. The goal of the course is to help students become more innovative and entrepreneurial as individuals, teammates, and members of organizations. This course will provide value to students considering entrepreneurship directly (e.g., founder), considering a career related to entrepreneurship (e.g., product manager, venture capital), or—most commonly—bringing entrepreneurial and innovative frameworks to an established organization.

The goal of this course is to train students how to frame, analyze, and construct coherent research questions and theoretical arguments. We will also discuss how to connect the “front end” to the paper’s empirical strategy and evidence, or “back end.” This course draws on research in an interdisciplinary fashion, and thus we will not attempt to survey comprehensively any particular substantive topic in those literatures. Students should therefore view the course as a complement to, rather than as a substitute for, subject-based courses.