Turn Your Entrepreneurial Passion Into Market-Ready Products & Services
UW-Stout Polytechnic's Entrepreneurship & Innovation Minor provides students from the humanities, sciences, mathematics, engineering, and management with the knowledge and leadership skills to effectively, ethically, and strategically commercialize innovation, start a business, create/manage projects within companies, and to embrace life and work with an entrepreneurial mindset.
Minor Requirements
Program Objectives
- Entrepreneurial Financial Literacy: Students will gain a basic knowledge of personal financial statements development and assessment; cash flow and debt management; asset acquisition; education planning; planning elements of risk management; investment planning; and retirement planning.
- Innovation/Problem Solving: Students will understand and demonstrate an ability to solve needs and opportunity-based problems while developing scalable customer-focused solutions through learning concepts of design thinking and lean modeling.
- Leadership: Students will practice leadership skills required in entrepreneurial/intrapreneurial situations through effective and inclusive communication, teamwork, and data-based decision-making. Team formation/hiring in organizations of varying size and scope, dealing with uncertainty and understanding how to balance cross-cultural points of view, accepting counsel, and catalyzing motivation and performance in others.
- Procurement & Resource Management: Students will explore solutions to problems and new problems through focused testing, learn to understand what makes a problem, product or system a success or failure, test stakeholder/customer value of the prototype, and learn how to access resources both research/data-based and supply-based.
- Marketing/Market Research: Students will research both narrowly and broadly the data necessary to extract market-related information to make business decisions necessary to reduce risk in product development, marketing and sales and to increase opportunities for financial success.
- Regulations/Intellectual Property: Students will improve their ability to recognize and manage legal risks in business decision making.
- Business Planning: Students will gain both understanding and proficiency in writing and describing the potential profitability of a business through market exploration and analysis specific to a proposed idea, product, or service, learning to write a business and/or innovation plan to articulate one’s idea to a diverse range of shareholders, financiers, and employees.
- Experiential Activity: In the spirit of the polytechnic, students will be expected to complete a minimum of 2-semesters of entrepreneurial activity in an extra-curricular setting determined in consult with their program directors and approved by the minor advisor. These include working on a venture (not for credit), participating in a student organization such as AMA or ENT, participating in events like 3DS and competitions like WBIT, HATCH, and others.