Entrepreneurship: Now a Major

Graduates with entrepreneurial skills are increasingly valued by employers. Paul L. Newby II

This fall, the Wisconsin School of Business offered an entrepreneurship major for the first time.

The new option will be ideal for double majors, says Dan Olszewski ’87, Goldberg Family Director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship. It gives students a chance to combine entrepreneurship with another area of expertise. “This allows students to obtain deep domain expertise in a field but also augment that with knowing they want to start a business in the future, which makes for a really powerful combination,” he says.

Previously, courses on entrepreneurship were an option under the management and human resources major. But now, entrepreneurship, management, and human resource management will all be stand-alone majors.

Experiential learning is an important component of the new major, and electives include classes where students learn to build and assess their own start-ups. An introductory course will include students from both within and outside the business school, providing valuable experience working on the cross-functional teams typical of many real-world start-ups.

Olszewski says entrepreneurial thinking — skills and mindsets characterized by curiosity, ambition, and creativity — is in high demand among employers.

“We’ve found that big companies are now valuing the entrepreneurial mindset so much more than they used to,” he says. “They realize that they need to be an innovative company to survive in the future, so firms are seeking that out.”

Published in the Winter 2024 issue