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Another Class on Entrepreneurship

An interest in entrepreneurship has led me to take another entrepreneurship class at Northwestern next term.  As it turns out, it’s one of the most popular courses is Northwestern. It’s Kellogg’s NUvention program, which is interdisciplinary class that brings together students from the Kellogg School, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern Law and the Feinberg School of Medicine. As you might imagine, this interdisciplinary class looks like it will turn out to be pretty interesting.

The premise of NUVention is to allow students to work with companies that are creating and launching viable businesses, so students can experience the entire entrepreneurial lifecycle.  Starting from ideation to concept, and moving to prototype and business plan, students have the chance to see what it means to create a real business. And the best part is that you work on them in diverse teams.

Teams from many of Northwestern’s programs come together for NUVention. We get to work with law students on patent research and other legal issues; engineering students on design and development; Kellogg students on market research and business plan development, and PhDs from other schools as well.

Personally, I’ll do be doing the NUVention Energy option, which means our project will be related to clean technology. There other two options are NUVention Medical and NUVention Web. As you might suspect, I had a really strong interest in the Web class, but unfortunately the timing of the class prohibited me from taking it.

My NUVention Energy class will take place next quarter. Just two weeks ago, I met the other six people that would be on my time. One other law student, two Kellogg students, two McCormick students, and one graduate student from the School of Arts and Sciences.  And then me,  joint JD-MBA student.

Before next quarter begins, we’ll all meet up to get to know each other better. In fact, I’m taking the lead on organizing that meet up as we speak.  At some point soon, we’ll also take on different roles for the team. Someone to work on legal issues. Someone to work on technology. Another person to run the business model. Another to work on sales and marketing. And then likely one project manager.

And in a ten week course, we’ll go from concept to business plan, and then present our findings to the company. Our project is about coming up with a business plan for a Chemical Agent Detection device, and it seems pretty interesting so far.

Stay tuned to hear more about how the class goes next quarter.

2 Comments to Another Class on Entrepreneurship

vtellis
November 21, 2011

Don’t forget about the NUvention Innovate for Impact (i4i), which kicked off this year and is sending teams to countries around the world to fight problems in poverty and health.

Class description: The curriculum provide the tools and frameworks needed to understand the user, evaluate market demand, create and assess a prototype, design a business model, assemble a business plan and solicit funding. After ten weeks in the classroom, the interdisciplinary teams will spend two weeks on the ground understanding their customer, market, distribution channels and stakeholders. Using the learnings from field work, teams will then return for five weeks in the classroom where you will dive into the nuts-and-bolts of launching an impact venture.

Jeremy C Wilson
November 21, 2011

@vtellis
Viren,

Thanks for commenting. Innovate for Impact is an awesome addition. I should not have left it off the list.

I strongly considered applying and would recommend the same to anyone else looking at NUVention. Personally, my choice came down to units and timing, so that’s why Energy made the top of my list. But otherwise, I agree with you that NUVention Innovate for Impact would have been great.

#Awesome!
Jeremy

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