Entrepreneurship in IST - IST 440W
August 25, 2008
Dr. Gerry Santoro recently filled me in on his section of IST 440W, the IST capstone class, which he will be teaching this fall. His section will be focused on entrepreneurship - the syllabus is already online here.
There have been 440W sections focused on entrepreneurship in past semesters, but the new approach that Dr. Santoro is taking will be to have the students plan and develop a Web 2.0 service. I see this as useful, as it will more directly involve students in the “doing” of entrepreneurship, as opposed to just a discussion. This should be helpful in terms of engaging the class. Possible activities include competitive market study, business plans, system design (including storyboards, prototypes, technical requirements), and a demo video (for prospective users and investors).
Dr. Santoro’s class format draws from his previous IST 402 Emerging Technologies class, which focused on LAMP development. It was this class from which David Rusenko and team emerged with Weebly, which then received seed funding from Y Combinator and additional angel funding.
The proposed activities sound interesting, and should certainly be more effective at engaging the students in actual entrepreneurship than just reviewing sample business plans. I wonder if it would be useful to draw parallels to some of the Engineering Entrepreneurship minor courses, where student teams compete on the basis of how much revenue they can generate during a 4-week period? Perhaps for this class, it would be telling to have a competition to determine which team can generate the most adoption?
However the class is implemented, I am sure it will produce some interesting and exciting results. It is also exciting, as Dr. Santoro will be aligning in some aspects with the Lion Launch Pad!
