Entrepreneurship Minor Pivots to More Accessible Format

Over the last three years of teaching E3, Emerson’s intensive full-year entrepreneurship minor, Shannon Rose McAuliffe has been going through a little “entrepreneurial prototyping process” of her own.

After observing what works well, what could use tweaking, and what students want to focus on, she’ll be introducing a new iteration of the signature program next fall, one that will ensure all students receive a baseline knowledge of marketing. This will include more in-depth, differentiated classes, allowing for a greater number of students to participate.

“They always say it takes at least three times before you figure out how to teach a course,” McAuliffe, an affiliated faculty member in Marketing Communication, said. “You never know who’s walking in the door, what background they have, what industry they’ll want to work in, and the world is shifting so much at the same time.”

E3 (Emerson’s Entrepreneurial Experience) is a yearlong immersive program that takes students from the germ of an idea to business or nonprofit venture. It culminates in the E3 Expo, where students pitch their plans, Shark Tank-style, to a panel of judges from business and academia.

Over the years, E3 has launched roughly 150 businesses across all sorts of sectors. It was founded two decades ago under Karl Baehr, and, following Baehr’s 2013 death, continued to amass success stories under Lu Ann Reeb, currently chair of the Journalism Department.

“It’s a signature program for Emerson,” said Marketing Communication Assistant Professor Eric Hogue, who worked with McAuliffe on the restructuring of the Entrepreneurship minor. “Most colleges for undergraduates do not have entrepreneurship programs, typically they are more a part of an MBA program or … a graduate program.”

But while the E3 model, which takes a single cohort through 16 credits over two semesters, is great for students who have strong foundations in business and marketing principles and thrive on intensity, it can be daunting for many, too. McAuliffe hopes this new structure will attract those who may be new to marketing, have trouble committing so much of one year to just one course, and those who want a minor that sits easily alongside their major coursework.  

“We came to realize that the 16-credit, 8-fall, 8-spring, model, it’s a high bar for participation,” McAuliffe said. “And breaking it into a more modular format [still] allows people to get into the entrepreneurial mindset.”

All the skills and concepts that students pick up throughout their year in E3 –market research, reaching target audiences, finding customers and creating personas, finance and funding, and getting a prototype to a minimum viable product — will be offered with the Entrepreneurship minor, but presented in subject-specific courses.

“This will help the academic piece go a lot deeper, because trying to juggle all of those concepts that really span four to five separate classes, it gets occluded,” McAuliffe said.

The new structure will also level up all students. In her current cohort, McAuliffe said she has students who came to E3 having taken in-depth business and finance courses, and one student who before E3, had never set foot in a marketing class. The Entrepreneurship minor will ensure all students take a 200-level introductory class that sets the table for all of the academic and hands-on skill-building to come.  

As it does now, the minor will culminate in students’ pitching their ventures to “investors,” a capstone that incorporates all the theoretical and practical knowledge they’ve built over the semester.

In this media environment, a solid foundation in entrepreneurial studies is critical to a number of careers, Hogue said, so it’s important that the minor is accessible to students in any major.

“If you’re going to be in film, you need to be an entrepreneur. If you are going to go work for Netflix, they need entrepreneurs. If you are going to do your own venture, obviously, you need the skills that come from an entrepreneurship program,” he said.

Much of the evolution of the minor has been driven by the students themselves, said McAuliffe, who stays in touch with many E3 graduates and hears firsthand how what they’ve learned has helped them in their careers.

“They tell me what they’ve brought out into the world, how it is helping them, how it is serving them,” McAuliffe said. “And having that feedback from prior students just telling me about what has worked for them outside Emerson has been a significant driver in how I have structured current iterations of the class, and how we have built it for this upcoming model.”