Entrepreneurial Courses
Creativity & Opportunity Recognition 4422
This course serves as an introduction to the entrepreneurial process and other entrepreneurship classes at Ivey. Specifically, this class focuses on creating or searching for venture ideas and screening them for valid business opportunity. This is typically seen at the beginning of the entrepreneurial process: Searching – Screening – Planning – Financing – Set-up – Start-up – Harvest.
New Venture Creation 4452
The purpose of this course is to explore the many dimensions of new venture creation and growth, and to foster innovation and new business formations in independent and corporate settings. Students will learn to effectively screen venture ideas, formulate a business strategy, assess the potential viability of a new venture, and how, when, how much and what type of financing to raise.
Managing High Growth Companies 4432
This course provides an orientation to what it is like to manage a high growth company. Through a series of case studies, readings and shared experience, students will analyze young, rapidly growing ventures where time and money shortages, uncertainty, and the importance of rigorous evaluation of opportunities take on high orders of intensity. Students will also look at how factors like organizational structure, partnerships and financial expectations for success not only impact a growing concern, but themselves change as a company grows.
Entrepreneurial Finance 4439
The primary focus of this course is on the financial challenges confronting small and medium sized businesses that are growing rapidly or aspire to rapid growth. There is a focus on: (1) understanding the nature of the financing problem, (2) becoming familiar with the many sources of funds for these firms with particular emphasis on banks, angel investors, private placements, institutional venture capital and public issues of equity, (3) becoming familiar with the tax and regulatory environment within which such financing is obtained, and most importantly (4) learning the key elements that enter into the structuring of the “deal” between demanders and suppliers of funds.
Entrepreneurial Marketing 4441
The course focuses on the issues of growing the sales of high-potential ventures. Typically, these are ventures formed with the objective of either doubling sales for an existing business or building $20 million per year of new business from zero in less than five years. The high-potential setting highlights the conflicts between the expectations of employees and investors and the constraints of cash and time.
Leading Family Firms 4465
This course offers insights that are helpful to three types of audiences: (1) students that come from business families who expect to play a key role in family enterprises, (2) students that expect a career in investment banking, financial services or consulting, where there will be a high degree of interaction with business families, (3) entrepreneurs who realize that over the next decade a substantial number of family owned companies will change generational ownership, and many of these will be acquisition and merger candidates. A key purpose of the course is to make students aware of the massive economic role family-controlled businesses play in the global economy. It is a certainty that in the students future careers they will deal with an opportunity, a supplier, an employer or a philanthropic endeavor controlled by a business family. There are unique characteristics of these enterprises, and a key objective is to expose students to these characteristics and identify the strengths, weaknesses and best practices.
Management of Services 4434
This course is intended primarily for students who will work in any industry in the service sector and in any functional area of the organization. It will be of particular interest to those who will conduct business with service producers, or those who will purchase service businesses. This course takes both a strategic as well as an operational perspective and seeks to improve students understanding of organizations that produce services instead of (and in addition to) goods.
Strategic Leadership 4490
This course is designed to help students “wrap their brains” around the paradox of leading and managing. Organizations need leaders with a long-term perspective. This means that they need entrepreneurs and executives who are willing to accept risk and to invest in employee development and training, market research, and research and development. Organizations and new ventures also need executives with a day-to-day perspective who define levels of required return, specify budgets and evaluate subordinates on the basis of objective financial information in addition to the strategic process that led their organization’s performance. The paradox created by the necessity for today’s entrepreneurs to be both leaders and managers is the focus of this course.
Management of Professional Service Firms 4489
The professional service firm represents the confluence of two major trends in the global economy: the growing importance of the service sector and the increasing number of knowledge workers. A fundamental premise of this course is that, irrespective of the profession, professional service firms share a host of management challenges that are different from those in any other sort of organization. These differences are related to a common form of firm ownership — partnerships — the characteristics of professional work, and the needs and personalities of professionals. The course develops frameworks for analysis, classification and management. The objectives of the course are to study the special characteristics of professionalism, to improve our ability to succeed as professionals, and to improve our ability to manage professionals.