MIT Entrepreneurship Development Program

Entrepreneurship drives innovation and economic growth. It enables new ideas, novel approaches, and innovative technologies to reach the marketplace. Entrepreneurship underlies the competitiveness and prosperity that characterize the U.S. economy and the economies of many other democratic societies.

The Entrepreneurship Development Program (EDP) leverages MIT's culture of high-tech entrepreneurship to help entrepreneurs, corporate venturing executives, and others involved in entrepreneurial environments learn what they need to develop ideas into successful businesses, and how to increase entrepreneurial opportunities in their corporations, institutions, and regions. The course introduces participants to MIT's technology transfer system, entrepreneurial educational programs, and entrepreneurial network that have created more than 5,000 firms (so far) with combined annual sales of over $200 billion.

In lectures, visits to high-tech start-ups, and live case studies with successful entrepreneurs, participants learn to identify and evaluate opportunities for new ventures, how the U.S. venture capital investment process works, and how the venture creation process may vary according to country. Understanding how to build new companies from corporate laboratories or university-based science and technologies is critical to this process.

The program covers the entire venture creation process from idea generation to building viable businesses, with special emphasis on the nurturing roles of corporations, universities, governments, and foundations. Using MIT's entrepreneurial culture as a model, participants learn what they need to know to make high-tech startups successful.

Entrepreneurship Development Program