Becoming Entrepreneurial: Purpose, Paths, and Inspiration

Entrepreneurship doesn’t start with a business plan — it starts with how you see yourself and the many ways you can create value. This course helps you build that foundation by expanding your definition of entrepreneurship beyond startups and showing you the diverse paths real people take to make an impact.

Guided by Professor Lori Rosenkopf and grounded in her book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, you’ll explore the Seven Pathways to Entrepreneurship, a practical framework that highlights routes such as intrapreneurship, acquisition, social innovation, technology commercialization, and bootstrapping. You’ll connect these pathways to your own skills, values, and experiences, clarifying where you fit in the entrepreneurial landscape and what “success” looks like for you. By the end of the course, you’ll understand how entrepreneurs think and act under uncertainty, and you’ll have a concrete, personally meaningful plan for your next entrepreneurial step.

This course teaches an inclusive, research-based approach to entrepreneurship as value creation through innovation. By the end of the course, you will be able to:

·        Apply a broad, inclusive definition of entrepreneurship that encompasses ventures, intrapreneurship, acquisition, investing, and social impact, and recognize how each creates value in different contexts

·        Connect your skills, values, leadership style, and risk preferences to one or more pathways that fit your goals and circumstances

·        Identify the resources, relationships, and experiences you can leverage to move your ideas forward

·        Use the Six Rs (Reason, Recombination, Relationships, Resources, Resilience, and Results) to think and act like an entrepreneur in real-world situations

·        Design small, low-risk experiments to test ideas, gather feedback, and build momentum

·        Cultivate habits of curiosity, reflection, resilience, and ongoing learning that support long-term entrepreneurial growth