A Networking Curriculum to Enhance Entrepreneurship Education

In a climate of international competition and economic uncertainty, government increasingly depends on higher education to play a pivotal role in preparing students for careers in tech entrepreneurship. Yet educating students about entrepreneurship can be difficult, especially in a rapidly changing entrepreneurial landscape and amid an already-intensive core curriculum in their respective domains. Increasingly, engineering and business programs are offering entrepreneurship courses as electives to students from across campus who are eager to learn the basics. Typically, these classes focus on traditional fundraising approaches, which develop a face-to-face fundraising pitch to a select panel of experts at end of term. Today, however, cutting-edge entrepreneurship technologies have made it possible for instructors to envision teaching entrepreneurship in real world environments, developing new ventures with broad appeal to large and diverse networks of potential funders. Crowdfunding provides a hands-on way for interdisciplinary student teams to learn about tech entrepreneurship, specifically fundraising and relationship development. We propose to develop a self-directed and readily disseminable online networking curriculum to help student teams become better entrepreneurs by learning how to develop their networks for crowdfunding campaigns.