Georgetown McDonough to Launch Minor in Entrepreneurship

After nearly a decade of developing entrepreneurship opportunities at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, the school will begin to admit undergraduate students to a new entrepreneurship minor in the fall.

“It’s been a wonderful journey of watching entrepreneurship at Georgetown grow and develop into an area of study and exploration that really captures the dreams and the hopes of undergraduates,” said Patricia Grant, senior associate dean of the Undergraduate Program.

According to Chris Rider, the academic director for the minor and associate professor of strategy, recent student feedback indicates that nearly 60 percent of students in the business school have some interest in pursuing a minor in entrepreneurship.

The minor will comprise four courses (12 credits), three of which will be required and one of which will be an elective. The course sequence will ensure that students who complete the minor will develop skills such as critical reasoning and decision-making in complex markets and industries, opportunity identification based on market and industry analysis, and design concepts for products and services.

Additionally, students in the minor will be encouraged and sometimes required to participate in the co-curricular activities of the Entrepreneurship Initiative, which will still be open to all Georgetown University students.

“We’ll have a group of students doing the entrepreneurship minor who can focus their coursework on this topic, but we don’t want that group to be the only students on campus who can access those programs,” said Jeff Reid, founding director of the Entrepreneurship Initiative, who also noted the essential support of philanthropic donors in launching the minor.

The new program is an important step in growing entrepreneurship at Georgetown and in turning entrepreneurship into a value that students not only list, but also tout, added Grant. 

By providing academic structure and direction, the entrepreneurship minor will create a launch pad for students’ dreams to leap off the Hilltop into practical application, said Grant. “It’s not about the four years on campus as much as it is about how those four years create the opportunity for a lifetime of innovation and problem-solving,” she said.