Cluster Contact
Jamey Darnell
Assistant Director, Intercollege Minor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ENTI)
Director, New Ventures Cluster
417 Business Building
814-863-0740
jad961@psu.edu
About the New Ventures Cluster
Total number of credits in this cluster: 9 or 10
The New Ventures Cluster is designed to help students develop the skills and ways of thinking required to create, develop, innovate and manage entrepreneurial ventures. Students learn about acquiring and balancing limited resources, changing venture direction quickly, building an entrepreneurial team, managing intellectual property, and creating new opportunities and markets. This cluster develops a wide range of managerial skills not usually demanded in one person within a larger organization, such as:
- Acquiring and balancing limited resources
- Changing direction quickly
- Building a coherent team
- Managing intellectual property
- Creating new markets
The number of credits in this cluster depend on the selection of courses in the area of business law; see list of courses below.
Students who complete this cluster develop skills and knowledge in 14 areas:
- Opportunity recognition
- New product development
- Innovative thinking
- Tolerance for ambiguity
- Resource acquisition
- Entrepreneurs and ethical leadership
- Entrepreneurial management
- Entrepreneurial finance
- Effective teamwork
- Entrepreneurial marketing
- Entrepreneurial and innovation strategy
- Technology commercialization
- Intellectual property management
- Business law
Preferred Sequence of Courses for the New Ventures Cluster
| Core Courses | Credits | Semester |
|---|---|---|
| MGMT/ENTR 215: Entrepreneurial Mindset | 3 | 1-4 |
| ENGR/ENTR 310: Entrepreneurial Leadership | 3 | 3-6 |
| ↓ | ||
| Choose 9 or 10 credits from the list of cluster courses. | 9-10 | |
↓ |
||
| MGMT/ENTR 425: New Venture Creation | 3 | 4-8 |
To meet the prerequisite requirement for MGMT/IST/ENGR 425, you must take one of the following:
- ECON 102 Introductory Microeconomic Analysis and Policy
- ECON 104 Introductory Macroeconomic Analysis and Policy
- Both ECON 014 Principles of Economics and CAS 100 Effective Speech
New Ventures Course Options
In addition to taking the three required ENTI core courses (215, 310, and 425), students must take three cluster specific courses from this list:
- MGMT 426 Invention Commercialization
- MGMT 427 Managing an Entrepreneurial Start-Up Company or MGMT 427W Managing an Entrepreneurial Start-Up Company
- MGMT 451 Business, Ethics and Society or MGMT 451W Business, Ethics, and Society
- B A 250 Small Business Management - (Course not currently offered at University Park)
In addition to the above list, the BA 241/BA 242 course pairing and three law-related courses are options for the New Ventures cluster. Students may only take one of the following courses to count towards the three required for this specific cluster:
- B A 241 Legal Environment of Business AND B A 242 Social and Ethical Environment of Business
- B A 243 Social, Legal, and Ethical Environment of Business
- B LAW 243 Social, Legal, and Ethical Environment of Business; non-Smeal students only
- B LAW 341 Business Law I: Introduction to Contracts, Liability Issues, and Intellectual Property
