Venture Engineering (15.373)

About the Class

Faculty

Venture Engineering - 2.912J / 3.085J/ 15.373J This course provides an integrated approach to the development and growth of new innovative ventures. The course is intended for MIT undergraduates who seek to leverage their engineering and science background through innovation - driven entrepreneurship. It serves as a foundational class for the MIT School of Engineering Entrepreneurship Certificate. It is also as one of the two required courses for the MIT Innovation and Entrepreneurship Minor. The course is designed to be a fun but also rigorous and comprehensive view of not just new venture creation but also what it takes to be successful in the different forms of entrepreneurship, which is more than just founding startups. It is a mindset, skill-set and way of operating that will benefit you no matter what you do going forward. The course is intended for undergraduates with a strong technical background but does not assume prior business or management experience. The course can be taken as a stand alone course and the student will receive benefit. It is also highly complementary to and serves as a strong foundation for a range of innovation and entrepreneurship courses around MIT. The course is particularly appropriate for a student who like to found or join a start-up company at some point in their career but it also gives you the confidence and capacity to be an entrepreneur inside existing organizations which is what will increase your career velocity, even if you chose to stay in academia. The course combines interactive lectures, in class exercises and competitions, and team projects. The course leverages both academic research and the most current practical implementation to create an experiential but also rigorous educational experience for students to better understand and become innovation-driven entrepreneurs in the best place in the world to do this – MIT. The class is highly interactive.

Bill Aulet

Bill is changing the way entrepreneurship is understood, taught, and practiced around the world. He is an award-winning educator and author whose current work is built off the foundation of his 25-year successful business career, first at IBM, and then as a three-time serial entrepreneur. During this time, he directly raised over a hundred million dollars and, more importantly, created hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholder value through his companies. Since 2009, Bill has been responsible for leading the development of entrepreneurship education across MIT at the Trust Center. His first book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship,” was released in August 2013, has been translated into over 20 languages, and has been the content for three online edX courses, which have been taken by hundreds of thousands of people in 200 different countries. The accompanying follow on book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workbook,” was released in April 2017. He has widely published in places such as the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, theBoston Globe, the Sloan Management Review, the Kauffman Foundation, Entrepreneur Magazine, MIT Sloan Experts, and more. He has been a featured speaker on shows such as CNBC’s Squawk Box, BBC News, Bloomberg News, as well as at events and conferences around the world. He has degrees from Harvard and MIT and is a board member of MITEK Systems (NASDAQ: MITK) and XL Hybrids Inc. (privately held) as well as a visiting professor at University of Strathclyde (Scotland). On July 1, 2017, Bill was named a Professor of the Practice at MIT Sloan, the first at the school in the area of entrepreneurship since Alex d’Arbeloff received the designation in 2003. Bill has earned external recognition as well for his efforts, which include Boston 50 on Fire, 2017 Favorite MBA Professors from Poets and Quants, and 2018 Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. In 2019, Bill was awarded the Outstanding Contributions to Advancing Innovation and Entrepreneurship Award by the Deshpande Foundation. In 2021, Bill was recognized by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) as the 2021 Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year.