Engineering course ‘demystifies’ entrepreneurship
Undergraduates at MIT have been known to spend countless hours conceiving and creating marketable innovations in labs and classrooms. Sometimes, however, they may struggle with turning their ideas into commercial reality. “One reason is that these students tend to focus all their time on inventing, as opposed to exploring the journey that awaits a startup founder,” says Ken Zolot, a seasoned entrepreneur and a senior lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. For the past four years, Zolot has led course 6.933 (The Founder’s Journey), in which engineering undergraduates — along with some students from other disciplines — focus on entrepreneurship and business strategy. Along the way, Zolot says, the course aims to “demystify and inspire entrepreneurship” so students will be equipped to continue with entrepreneurial pursuits — and maybe bring their inventions to fruition.MIT offers many other entrepreneurship classes for undergraduates — many of them...