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MBA Career Paths in Entrepreneurship

Create your path to an entrepreneurship career with an MBA from Chicago Booth.

What can you do with an MBA and a concentration in entrepreneurship? The sky’s the limit.

At Booth, you’ll join an unparalleled entrepreneurial community of students, alumni, and faculty who are passionate about turning ideas into impact. You’ll network with venture capitalists and explore the risks and rewards of building a startup, including through a number of business accelerator programs offered through the University of Chicago Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. You’ll also have access to the Polsky Exchange, a 34,000 square foot startup incubator.

And you’ll gain real-world experience in creating new ventures, competing for funding—and maybe even changing the world.

A Booth student and a friend walk along the lake shore downtown.

- Booth has so many resources
for entrepreneurship.

If you come here as a
really serious entrepreneur,

you have a very good chance

of being able to succeed in that role.

- I took this entrepreneurial
discovery my first quarter

which really helped and
focused on what's my problem

that I'm trying to solve,
not just the solution,

but who am I solving it for?

- That definitely was
helpful in terms of putting

a lot of the experiences I had

from developing the idea to
actually building a product

into frameworks that were more structured.

- The Venture Capital Lab,
so there's one PE section

and one VC section and
you find an internship

through that program and
then you get mentorship

through the class.

- EVC, the Entrepreneurship
and Venture Capital Group

has been fantastic.

They have a lot of founder focused series.

- Your peers as well as your friends

are gonna be extremely valuable.

We try to meet twice a quarter at minimum

just to share our progress

and then our feedback
on each other's idea.

- Polsky was another big
reason that I came to Booth

because it's a devoted center
that's very fully staffed

and well funded and so I can actually

just schedule mentorship
meetings with them

to talk through my business
idea or do a practice pitch

or talk through different business models.

- Polsky was really my home, I would say.

They were extremely
supportive of the process

and were always also connecting
me with other individuals

that could help me have more growth.

- I was a part of the EIP,

Entrepreneurship Internship Program

where we are supported
financially for the summer

to help grow and scale your business.

- We also had sessions
with a mentor from EIP

and we would just talk through
some of our challenges.

- What Booth afforded me is
to take a little bit more risk

because I always know
that there's a safety net

that I can kind of fall back on.

- [Maya] Booth is the
right place for anyone

who wants to do an MBA

and wants to do the
entrepreneurship route.

The reason number one
is flexibility by far.

It just allows entrepreneurs to flourish.

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MBA Industry paths: Entrepreneurship

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MBA Industry paths: Entrepreneurship

At Booth, You Own Your MBA Experience

A Booth MBA is rooted in The Chicago Approach,™ the educational philosophy that sets Booth apart from every other business school in the world.

What’s more, our MBA curriculum for Full-Time and Part-Time MBA students is the most customizable among top programs globally. You determine your path by sequencing your coursework and choosing the depth of study at Booth. You can customize your education to support your professional interests and goals, because there is no singular roadmap to career success.

Customize your MBA experience with courses that immerse you in a startup culture and teach you the tools you need to take your venture from idea to impact. Here are just a few of the many entrepreneurship-focused courses available at Booth.

Course Short Description
Lab to Launch Lab-based innovations have contributed the most important advances to humanity, from energy that power our lives to medicine that cures disease. But limited effort is placed on commercializing these discoveries. In this class, you’ll work in teams to build a new business, using a lab technology that is sourced from a leading research lab.
Women As CEOs, Entrepreneurs, Investors, Executives & Directors

 The goal of the course is to provide candid insight and purview into the personal and professional lives of leading women entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and private equity executives, what has helped catapult or has hampered their ability to lead organizations worldwide.
Building the New Venture

 Through class lectures, “game” assignments, and real-world cases, you will learn how to raise initial seed funding, establish initial brand values and positioning, leverage a strong niche position, determine appropriate sourcing and sales channels, and develop execution plans in sales, marketing, product development, and operations.
New Social Ventures

 In this course, groups of students will develop an idea for an innovative, startup social organization. They will conduct research to create a detailed plan for its creation and growth and pitch the plan to faculty, social entrepreneurs, domain experts, foundation officers, and philanthropists

To see more Booth MBA courses, visit our course catalog.

See more courses

MBA Concentrations at Booth You Can Consider

Our flexible curriculum gives you the freedom to focus your MBA experience on a specific area of interest. Earning an MBA concentration gives you deep knowledge in a given field and sets you up for success in your career. Concentrations are available to Full-Time, Evening, and Weekend MBA students.

Entrepreneurship is the most popular concentration at Booth. Several of our concentrations are of particular interest to students planning to pursue entrepreneurship careers with an MBA.

MBA Student Groups in Entrepreneurship

Participating in student-led groups is a great way to meet fellow entrepreneurs, explore new ventures, and make connections across our vibrant startup community.

Discover Student Stories

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Choose Your Path to Success

Tell us about yourself, and we will show you the value of a Booth education.

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Discover Alumni Outcomes

Our alumni are launching new ventures all over the world in fields ranging from cryptocurrency to research to winemaking.

Booth Research Centers in This Area

Our interdisciplinary research centers give you access to workshops, conferences, leading scholars, and research opportunities.

Faculty Research in Entrepreneurship

Our faculty are award-winning scholars whose work is regularly covered in Chicago Booth Review, our influential magazine focusing on business, policy, and markets.

Explore Chicago Booth Review

Leverage Resources Across the University

Booth MBA students who are interested in a career in entrepreneurship have access to the New Venture Challenge. Launched in 1996, the New Venture Challenge is recognized as one of the top-ranked accelerator programs in the nation. Companies that have been successfully launched through the NVC include Grubhub, Braintree/Venmo, and Simple Mills, among many others.

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