Come Fall 2024, for the first time ever, Business Badgers will be able to major in entrepreneurship.
Since 2006, Wisconsin School of Business students were able to study it only as a named option under the larger management and human resources (MHR) major. Now, students can declare entrepreneurship as a standalone major. Management and human resource management will become standalone majors as well.
While this move will help “raise the profile of entrepreneurship and grow all three majors,” says Dan Olszewski, Goldberg Family Director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship, the real benefit is for the students.
“The new entrepreneurship major is designed to be a good option for a double major,” Olszewski says. “It allows students to combine entrepreneurship with another functional expertise such as marketing or finance. 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.”
The entrepreneurship major includes a new class, “Strategic Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship,” designed by WSB faculty member Florence Honoré. After a successful pilot in Spring 2023, the course will be incorporated permanently into the curriculum.
“We’ve found that big companies are now valuing the entrepreneurial mindset so much more than they used to because they want the students, their future employees, to have that perspective. They realize that they need to be an innovative company to survive in the future, so firms are seeking that out.”
—Dan Olszewski
“This new class, with the focus on corporate entrepreneurship, will benefit the majority of students who are planning on using these tools at graduation in a larger company, versus starting their own business,” says Olszewski. Many students take roles in areas like product management, new product development, financial analyst, or marketer, he says, and graduates have joined high-profile companies ranging from Google to Goldman Sachs.
Olszewski says the entrepreneurial thinking taught at WSB—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 because they want the students, their future employees, to have that perspective. They realize that they need to be an innovative company to survive in the future, so firms are seeking that out.”
Similarly, experiential learning—applying what is learned in class to a problem or project—is an important component of the entrepreneurship major. Sample electives include courses from the Creative Destruction Lab and the Venture Creation class, where students learn to build and assess their own startups.
Experiential learning is a key WSB strategy across all undergraduate majors, and for good reason, Olszewski says. “Where you get the best learning is when you actually have to try to go do it.”
The new entrepreneurship major’s introductory course will include students from both the business school and students from across the rest of the campus. Most startup teams have a mix of different skill sets so this will provide new opportunities for students to work on cross-functional teams.
Management and human resource management majors prepare students for diverse professional pathways
As a result of the move to three separate majors, management and human resource management benefit from increased visibility.
The management major “sets students up to be promoted,” says Russ Coff, Thomas J. Falk Distinguished Chair in Business and chair of the Department of Management and Human Resources. “Students who are great at solving sales, finance, accounting, or operations problems eventually need to learn how to manage people. This major also prepares students for management training or rotational programs that recruit on campus.”
Coff says that with the new majors plus the growth of the consulting certificate, more courses are being offered in consulting, leading change, leading teams, strategic management, and people analytics.
On the human resource management major side, “we have deepened the HR knowledge base,” says Coff. “Our graduates are increasingly SHRM certified—ready to hit the ground running in an HR career.” The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is the preeminent professional membership society for human resource management, and Business Badgers learn and have access to opportunities from WSB’s Strategic Human Resource Management Center that is SHRM-aligned.
In their courses, students in the major build human resource knowledge and know-how including on compensation, staffing, people analytics, negotiation, and diversity, which are all “essential to be successful HR professionals in modern organizations,” Coff says.