Students who wish to launch a startup are encouraged to pursue the Entrepreneurship Pathway – a cross-functional sequence of courses that addresses strategy, finance, organizations and marketing through the lens of new venture creation. A hallmark of the program is Kellogg’s Discover. Test. Launch. series.
Entrepreneurship is a career path for many students upon graduation or later in their career. Launching a new venture raises unique challenges given that a sustainable business model has yet to be determined and financial resources are initially limited. This pathway offers a curriculum that combines strategy, finance, organizations, and marketing in pursuit of successful new venture creation. The pathway includes a sequence that allows interested students to develop and launch new companies (ENTR 462, 464, and 466), coupled with courses that develop discipline-based skills of particular relevance to building new firms.
Faculty sponsors: Ben Jones (Strategy), Mitchell Petersen (Finance)
*These two courses have significant content overlap and students should not take both courses.
NUvention courses offered through McCormick include discover, test, launch phases.
Learn MoreThe Growth & Scaling Pathway prepares students for this challenge by offering courses that emphasize functional depth and experiential learning across all business functions, including strategy, operations, marketing and management.
Profitably growing and scaling businesses is a central challenge for business leaders. It reaches across all business functions and components, including
The pathway emphasizes functional depth and experiential learning on these dynamic topics in management with applications to small- and middle-market enterprises (SMEs). As such, the pathway will be of particular interest to students with career aspirations in:
Faculty sponsors: Ben Jones (Strategy), Mike Mazzeo (Strategy)
Growth Strategy Practicum
ENTR 615-0
Now more than ever, large corporations are focusing on innovation initiatives that ensure they remain relevant within a rapidly-changing business environment. Our Corporate Innovation courses offer students highly immersive and experiential learning opportunities that places them in the center of this competitive environment.
These classes are designed to help students understand the funding options for startups and how to navigate the complex world of finance.
The driving theme behind Kellogg’s Venture Capital and Private Equity (VC/PE) pathway is to identify and exploit the potential sources of value in private, public, and closely-held firms by VCs and PEs. This interdisciplinary pathway provides students with the analytical framework and tools necessary to successfully conduct venture capital and private equity transactions, execute mergers and acquisitions, and engage in corporate restructuring activities. The pathway is structured along potential sources of value that VC/PE investors can extract. This pathway has different tracks depending on whether students are interested more in Venture Capital, Growth Equity, or LBOs. It also has a strong international component for those students who are interested in exploring the practices in countries that do not have common law legal systems.
In venture capital, investors may generate value in early stage companies by engaging in operational and strategic engineering that focuses on getting the most from the company’s resources. For investors in the growth equity segment of the private equity industry, these same skills apply. In addition, growth equity investors may redesign a company’s governance structure to reduce frictions between management and shareholders and between non-controlling and controlling shareholders, resulting in management decisions more aligned with shareholder interests. In doing so, they will use financial contracts that are characterized by steep incentives for the management team. Private equity investors engaged in leveraged buy-outs (LBOs) and restructuring create value with operational and governance changes, as well. They may also exploit inefficiencies in capital markets by restructuring a company’s liabilities or by purchasing undervalued assets and selling them at or above their fundamental value.
The VC/PE pathway emphasizes financial, operational, and strategic skills for venture capital investors, adds approaches to corporate governance for growth equity investors, and provides a greater emphasis on accounting and financial skills for LBOs and corporate restructuring. In addition to the Evanston classes, students interested in working for start-ups (series B and further) or venture capital firms should consider the San Francisco immersion program offered in the winter.
Foundational courses are strongly recommended for students who are planning to undertake a career in the industry. Exploratory courses are introductory courses which could be taken with little prerequisites. Experiential courses can be taken without prior knowledge; however, for a more effective experience, it is recommended that students enroll in the foundational courses before or concurrently.
Kellogg offers courses to support leaders of family enterprises at various stages of growth. Learn more