Entrepreneurship Online Graduate Certificate

This class is designed to strengthen your customer management skills and further your understanding of a set of powerful ideas about how to manage customers for superior business performance. You will be exposed to a set of well-established and effective strategies to create, deliver, and sustain superior customer value, as well as some of the most novel and cutting-edge ideas in customer management. By the conclusion of the course, you will have acquired both formal frameworks and fresh ideas about how to acquire and retain customers. 

Recent surveys indicate that innovation is at the top of the agenda for more than three-quarters of executives; at the same time, nearly as many report failing to meet their own hopes and expectations for their innovation initiatives. This graduate-level course will focus on what is increasingly understood to be a primary reason for the gap between aspirations and outcomes for innovation and entrepreneurship: the leadership and organization of the innovative process.  As companies shift their thinking about innovation from being a fundamentally technological or mechanistic endeavor to one that is more organic, creative, and human-centered, so have they shifted their management concerns. Among them:  What role does innovation play in overall strategy and where does it fit into strategic plans? What kind of leadership (or leaders) is required to develop an innovative culture? What are the implications for organizational structure and process?  Is organizational innovations needed before companies can achieve their innovation objectives? Through readings, cases, exercises, and projects, we will explore these and related questions on the intangible contributors to innovative success for both existing and new firms in manufacturing, services, and nonprofits. 

The Business for Entrepreneurs course will focus on topics of fundamental macroeconomics, accounting, management, and marketing. 

This course is organized as an introduction to entrepreneurial principles for those seeking to develop an owner-operated, lifestyle business. The primary audience for this course is those interested in starting a business in the traditional small-business business model with the aim to achieve high growth. Participants will learn how to start, expand, and grow their business with an emphasis on learning practical skills including effective leadership, negotiation, and managing conflict with confidence. Effective recruitment practices and how to make your business indispensable to your customers are among the key real-world skills taught. At the end of the course, student groups will compete to sell a similar assigned product in the marketplace and reflect on their experience.