Starting Startups: A Free Course (and More) for the Entrepreneur

Entre­pre­neur­ship and Busi­ness Plan­ning is a free course avail­able via pod­cast (iTunes  Feed  Mp3) that par­al­lels a class­room course being offered at Carnegie Mel­lon with­in the Mas­ters in Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems Man­age­ment (MISM) pro­gram. Taught by Mark Juliano, an adjunct pro­fes­sor who oth­er­wise works in the pri­vate sec­tor, the course cov­ers the ins-and-outs of start­ing a new ven­ture. Fol­low­ing a very log­i­cal tra­jec­to­ry, it starts with the fun­da­men­tals — devel­op­ing ideas for new com­pa­nies, writ­ing busi­ness plans, and cre­at­ing teams — and then moves through more advanced mate­ri­als that you’d typ­i­cal­ly find cov­ered in b‑school: mar­ket­ing, com­pet­i­tive strat­e­gy, sales, pric­ing, fund­ing and finance. Final­ly, when you dive into the pod­casts, you’ll real­ize that Juliano has clear­ly tak­en pains to present an acces­si­ble course for lis­ten­ers. Along with clear­ly pre­sent­ed lec­tures, you get a host of sup­port­ing online mate­ri­als, plus a course blog. A very nice touch.

Next, the busi­ness-mind­ed folks among us will also want to pore over the stel­lar col­lec­tion of entre­pre­neur­ship edu­ca­tion resources assem­bled by the Stan­ford Tech­nol­o­gy Ven­tures Pro­gram. Their media con­tent trove includes a sol­id col­lec­tion of pod­casts fea­tur­ing talks with busi­ness thought lead­ers (iTunes  Feed  Web Site), not to men­tion a cache of videos high­light­ing pre­sen­ta­tions by the exec­u­tives and VCs who make Sil­i­con Val­ley tick. Just gen­er­al­ly, you’ll want to explore the many oth­er resources in the Edu­ca­tors Cor­ner.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

150 Free Online Busi­ness Cours­es