Academics

Customizable and Cutting-Edge Curriculum

Our academic courses are designed to help you excel in all aspects of managing and scaling ventures. Whether you’re looking to launch a new venture, join a startup, grow a business or drive innovation within a firm, these classes will equip you with the tools you need to succeed.

Did you know?

Gain course credit working within a Bay Area startup or venture capital firm in Kellogg’s San Francisco Immersion Quarter

View our academic stats

Faculty At-A-Glance

Faculty Involvement

Curriculum At-A-Glance

Courses & Pathways

Our Entrepreneurship, Growth & Scaling and Corporate Innovation programs are designed to support you wherever you are on your leadership journey. You have the flexibility to take the classes that best support your professional goals, whether that’s launching a venture, joining a startup, growing and scaling an enterprise, or leading innovation within an established organization.

To help guide you through the process of selecting courses, Kellogg offers curricular pathways:

Entrepreneurship Pathway

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)


Entrepreneurship
Pathway

1 | Launch-Pad

Discover
New Venture Discovery
ENTR 462
Test
New Venture Development
ENTR 464
Launch
New Venture Launch
ENTR 466

2 | Building-blocks

Entrepreneurial Finance and Venture Capital
FINC 445

Global Entrepreneurial Finance
FINC 477

Entrepreneurial Tools for Digital Marketing
MKTG 961-5

Business-to-Business (B2B) Marketing 
MKTG 453
Entrepreneurship: Building Innovation, Teams, and Cultures
MORS 952-5

Introduction to Software Development
ENTR 451

Digital Marketing Implementation
MKTG 956
Business Law
BLAW 435

Launching and Leading Startups
ENTR 470

Startup Branding
ENTR 973-5
Intellectual Property for Entrepreneurs
ENTR 935-5*

Intellectual Capital Management
STRT 441*

Entrepreneurial Selling
ENTR 454


*These two courses have significant content overlap and students should not take both courses.

3 | Industry-Focused and Experiential

Medical Product Financing and Commercialization
ENTR 611

Real Estate Technology
REAL 930-5
Social Innovation: Designing for Change
SSIM 452
Real Estate Entrepreneurship
REAL 465
Commercializing Innovations
ENTR 958

4 | Nuvention (Cross-University)

NUvention courses offered through McCormick include discover, test, launch phases.

Learn More
 

Growth and Scaling Pathway

The 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

  • Strategy (e.g. when are external market conditions right for growth and how do market opportunities link with internal capabilities?),
  • Operations (e.g. how to scale efficiently to meet demand and maintain quality, given a potentially steep but uncertain growth path),
  • Finance (e.g. how to choose capital structure in light of growth opportunities),
  • Marketing (e.g. how to acquire new customers, extend brands, and link customer needs to internal product development), and
  • Organizations (e.g. how to maintain core cultural advantages yet shift organizational design and shift key team members as business grows).

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:

  • C-Suite of SMEs
  • Family Business
  • Private Equity/Search Funds

Faculty sponsors: Ben Jones (Strategy), Mike Mazzeo (Strategy)


Growth and Scaling
Pathway

Capstone Course

Growth Strategy Practicum
ENTR 615-0

Topic Courses

STRT
Strategies for Growth
STRT 475-5

Family Enterprises: Issues & Solutions
STRT 447
MORS
Recruiting & Retaining Talent in Growth Companies
MORS 927-5
OPNS
Strategic Decisions in Operations 
OPNS 454
MKTG
Marketing Consulting Lab 
MKTG 650

Omnichannel Experience Strategy  
MKTG 451

Business-to-Business (B2B) Marketing
MKTG 453
FINC
Entrepreneurial Finance and Venture Capital
FINC 445

Global Entrepreneurial Finance
FINC 477
ENTR
Entrepreneurship through Acquisition
ENTR 905-5

Launching and Leading Startups
ENTR 470

Corporate Innovation

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.

Venture Capital and Private Equity Pathway

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.

Faculty sponsors: Scott Baker (Finance), Jose Liberti (Finance) and Paola Sapienza (Finance)

Venture Capital and Private Equity
Pathway

Initial Courses – all tracks

Finance I
FINC 430
Finance II
FINC 431
or
Accelerated Corporate Finance 
FINC 440
Students should complete or test out from these courses before taking foundation courses or applying to the San Francisco Winter Immersion Program
Venture Capital
Private Equity
 

Family Enterprises

Kellogg offers courses to support leaders of family enterprises at various stages of growth. Learn more

Applications may be required for certain experiential learning and NUvention courses.

Social Impact

Interested in launching a social venture or nonprofit?

Course Catalog

Looking for more courses?

Events

Kellogg hosts entrepreneurship events year-round for students, alumni, faculty and a strong entrepreneurial network.

News

Our faculty and programming provide real-world insights and solutions to the broader business community.
  • Academics