NUvention

by Michelle Sheu Posted on July 7, 2015

Northwestern University

NUvention

Location: The Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (FCEI)

Mission: “NUvention is our flagship interdisciplinary course and forms the cornerstone of our goals as a center. It is a visionary academic partnership created to expand upon Northwestern University’s excellence in interdisciplinary study and to foster a sense of collaboration throughout Northwestern’s various schools. The program is designed to expose students to the entire innovation and entrepreneurial life cycle and to help them understand how innovations can become a viable business in the real world. And, it’s Northwestern’s most concerted effort to bring the world of startups to the classroom.

Hosted at The Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (FCEI), which evolves engineering beyond the application of the sciences to the creation of businesses that capitalize on innovations. We bring together faculty from an array of disciplines to develop a unique curriculum in which students experience the entire innovation/business life cycle—from ideation to prototyping and business plan development.”

Course Offerings:

  • NUvention: Analytics is a unique course designed to create opportunities for students to create new analytics technologies and then build businesses around their innovations.
  • NUvention: Arts is the newest NUvention class offering planned for Spring Quarter 2015. Our hope is to facilitate the creation, innovation, and organization of new ideas and companies in the field of the creative arts. The goal of this course is to help students understand that success in the arts is a function of passion, work ethic, talent, and entrepreneurial drive.

    • NUvention: Arts is the newest NUvention class offering planned for Spring Quarter 2015. The class is targeting students from across Northwestern with a passion for the arts. Our hope is to facilitate the creation, innovation, and organization of new ideas and companies in the field of the creative arts.  The goal of this course is to help students understand that success in the arts is a function of passion, work ethic, talent, and entrepreneurial drive. Those applying for this class should share a desire to learn about and/or desire to start a company in the creative arts.
  • NUvention: Consumer Products is a new one quarter class for students interested in innovating in the consumer products space. Proctor and Gamble has agreed to sponsor the class and loan us a senior scientist to lead the class. Apply Now.
  • NUvention: Energy responds to the demand for innovation and entrepreneurship in the sustainable energy and clean tech space, which will increasingly be required to deal with climate change, resource constraint, and other environmental challenges.
  • NUvention: Impact is an interdisciplinary experiential learning program designed to expose students to the design and launch of market-based ventures that address unmet needs in resource limited settings.
  • NUvention: Medical is a two-quarter interdisciplinary course designed to create opportunities for students to create new medical technologies and then build businesses around their innovations. Apply Now.
  • NUvention: Nano offers student teams the opportunity to work with an NU faculty member on commercializing a technology the faculty member believes has potential. Apply Now.
  • NUvention: Web + Media is an experiential learning program designed to expose students to the entire product and business development life cycle for a software company.
    • NUvention: Web + Media is a two-quarter capstone course in which students work across disciplines and Northwestern schools to design, plan, and run web-based businesses. Project areas include iPad/Tablet App, Mobile Applications, New Media, Social Gaming, Twitter or Facebook Apps, eCommerce/Deals, Analytics, Cloud, Big Data or ideas from students in the program.
  • Students may propose their own track through a form
  • Comprehensive information, details and syllabi available online

Entrepreneurship Classes:

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS ONLY

  • ENTREP 225: Principles of Entrepreneurship
    • These are introductory courses for students that have limited or no prior exposure to business. They are designed to build a knowledge foundation in all the key entrepreneurial subject areas. Each week, a new topic will be introduced using both lecture and case discussion teaching methods. We will help you learn each of these areas from an entrepreneurial perspective. This includes accounting, finance, and marketing. The final deliverable will be an elevator pitch. This course is cross-listed with IEMS
  • ENTREP 325: Engineering Entrepreneurship
    • The goal of the course is to provide you with an understanding of the environment of the entrepreneur. At the same time we will look at the concept of intrapreneuring (the entrepreneur inside the corporation). Through a series of cases the excitement and complexity of a new business becomes apparent. The work and the tasks faced by the entrepreneur are similar to those encountered in other management roles. There is, however, one essential ingredient that usually is quite different. The entrepreneur must work with an extremely limited set of resources. However the offset to this situation is the flexibility and speed with which the entrepreneur may act. This course is cross-listed with IEMS and offered every quarter.
  • ENTREP 380: Financing Entrepreneurial Ventures
    • Financing Entrepreneurial Ventures focuses on the entrepreneurial and financial aspects of planning, launching and growing a new venture, which in this course will be specifically defined as a “scalable startup”. A scalable startup “takes an innovative idea and searches for a scalable and repeatable business model that will turn it into a high growth, profitable company. A scalable startup typically requires external “risk” capital to create market demand and scale” (Steve Blank).This course will introduce students to the many sources of capital and the factors, issues and tradeoffs to be considered in financing entrepreneurial ventures of this type. The course will introduce students to relevant theory and practice in current entrepreneurial finance, with a special emphasis on angel and venture capital financing.
  • ENTREP 395: Special Topics In Entrepreneurship: Selling and Scaling
    • How do you build your venture, and at at the same time retain a great collaborative culture and continuous innovation? Don’t just be a Startup, learn how to become an Endup.  What are the necessary mindsets and methods to insure you and your venture grow? ENTREP 395 is an incubator bootcamp for your real-world project, where the course work centers on your venture.
  • ENTREP 395: Entrepreneurial Leadership & Decision-Making Dynamics

    • Entrepreneurial Leadership & Decision-Making Dynamics is designed for students who want to start and run companies, but don’t have their world-changing idea — yet. Students will work in small teams with real, high-growth companies and entrepreneurs. They will explore and experience risk, failure, project management and entrepreneurship.

GRADUATE STUDENTS ONLY 

  • ENTREP 419: Technical EntrepreneurshipThis course is designed to focus on the opportunities and challenges associated with starting a technology venture. The single greatest wealth creator of our generation and of every generation before us has been technology. Today, state of the art technology can be defined as nanotechnology, biotechnology, and Web 2.0. In previous generations, it was defined as the television and the internal combustion engine. In many cases, the innovator was not the entity that invented it or was best-positioned to introduce it to the marketplace.Before the business comes the idea. The goal of this class is to evolve an idea into a complete business. We will study all phases in the development of a business. We will provide students with a toolkit to more effectively create, assess, and build ideas into businesses. This class cannot make you into an entrepreneur or intrapreneur. It can help you better assess whether an idea is a business opportunity and how to transform that opportunity into a business.

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