FT Ranks Top 25 In Entrepreneurship

Harvard Business School Rock Center for Entrepreneurship - Ethan Baron photo

Harvard Business School Rock Center for Entrepreneurship – Ethan Baron photo

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS KELLOGG? OR HOW ABOUT RICE?

So how much credibility should readers put on this ranking? Truth be told, not very much. There’s less guidance here and more entertainment value. No one would quibble with Stanford and Babson at the top. But the absence of schools that have put major effort into this area suggests some real problems with the methodology.

Exhibit One: Northwestern University’s Kellogg School. Highlighting the entrepreneurship pathway at Kellogg is the three-course Launch-Pad, which includes three 10-week courses including New Venture Discovery, New Venture Development and New Venture Launch. Entrepreneurial-minded students may then pick from 20 elective courses that can be industry-specific and cross-disciplinary. Then, there is the Zell Fellows Program. Each year, the school accepts 10 students armed with ventures, invests $10,000 and gives them the space to run with the business idea. In this year’s cohort, Kellogg added a second cohort for students interested in entrepreneurship through acquisition (see How Kellogg Teaches Entrepreneurship).

Add it all up and Kellogg, ranked sixth in the number of Top 100 MBA Startups by Poets&Quants and 14th by U.S. News, now has nearly two dozen courses on entrepreneurship and a generous funding program to boot. That is far more than several of the schools on the new FT list. But Kellogg doesn’t warrant even a single mention in the ranking.

THE WORLD’S BIGGEST & RICHEST BUSINESS PLAN COMPETITION

And what about Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. The school has 16 separate courses for MBA entrepreneurs, from such basic offerings as The New Enterprise and The Entrepreneurial Toolkit to more advanced electives that include courses with deep dives in life sciences, technology, social enterprises, or commercializing pharma and biotech. And then for MBAs there are six experiential learning labs for second year students who are expected to work 12 to 15 hours per week on their own projects or those with a sponsoring company.

The backdrop to this thrust is the biggest and richest student business plan competition in the world, an event that is in its 15th year. This past April there were 750 applicants to the competition that ended up with 42 competing teams and 300 judges, offering coaching and feedback to the teams. The prize money? A remarkable $1.5 million annually.

So where is Rice University and the Jones School on the FT list? Nowhere.

IS HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL REALLY BEHIND UVA, DARTMOUTH, IESE & OXFORD IN MBA STARTUPS?

Then, there is Harvard, ranked 13th behind Virginia, Dartmouth, IESE and Oxford, among others. Yet, the second largest faculty group at HBS is now in entrepreneurship. The school’s curriculum actually requires student teams to create a micro-business that receives seed funding from the school, something no other major business school has in the required curriculum. The school currently has 19 entrepreneurs in residence, all of whom have started companies and are either on their next startup or investing in new firms (see Inside Harvard Business School’s Startup Machine). HBS also runs one of the most extensive new venture competitions with $150,000 in prize funding, not including the contest run for alumni with another $77,000 in prize money. The student contest attracted 41 competing teams this year, while the alumni competition drew nearly 200 teams. HBS is no newbie to this. This year’s competition in April was the 19th year for the competition.

And the result? This year, 42 of the Top 100 MBA Startups with the most funding on the Poets&Quants list were founded by Harvard MBAs, far more than any other business school. Stanford was second with 23 and then there is a massive gap between HBS and Stanford and everyone else. Columbia Business School had seven, MIT six, and Wharton five (see Top Business Schools For MBA Startups).

(See following page for the table of the top 25 ranked schools)

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