SCIENCE & EDUCATION

Entrepreneurship takes an eye for opportunity and a willingness to take risks, business school officials say. These new M.B.A. programs offer unconventional ways to help channel an entrepreneurial spirit:

In the "Discovery to Market" project at the Johns Hopkins University Carey School of Business, small groups of students in the new Global M.B.A. track will look for profitable opportunities in university scientists' work. The two-semester program, launching in Spring 2011, will be an intense systematic approach to spotting opportunities in potentially patentable discovery, says Philip Phan, Carey's vice dean for faculty.

"In terms of creating a sophisticated class of students that are good at using the basic tools of market research and evaluation, putting them to work on a project like that is probably the most difficult thing you can do," Phan said. "It pushes the students to apply these tools that oftentimes are taken for granted in a classroom and to apply them to a real setting where they may not apply very well."

If students find a discovery will be very likely profitable, employees at the Johns Hopkins Office of Technology Transfer will apply for a patent. Ultimately, for a successful discovery, "the students will have the option of being part of that team to start a company and take this thing to the next stage of development," Phan says.

The entrepreneurial education will now extend past graduation at Babson College F. W. Olin School of Business, which boasts the top-ranked entrepreneurship program for 17 years running.

Full text of the article on US News & World Report website